We say that you work for a big device manufacturer who is a fabric chip designer. In other words, when you design your chips, you have a lack of facilities for their preparation that explains the Fabilis label (Fab is short to facilitate the fabric of a semiconductor). Suppose a part of your work is to decide which foundry will prepare your chips. Right now, if you need modern semiconductors, you have only two possibilities, TSMC and Samsung Foundry.
But if you need your chips using the latest 3NM process node, there is no choice. TSMC is founder of selection. You may have to pay a higher price and hope that there is no capacity problem that will force your order to be allocated through the foundry. However, if reliability is a problem, which usually happens, you want the foundry to be a Samsung Foundry with a Samsung Foundry with a 90 % output instead of a 50 % production on this node.
Large tech firms that count themselves as TSMC users include Apple, Medetic, Nvidia, and Qualcomm. The latter, during 2021-2022, decided to prepare Snapdragon 8 General 1. However, the alleged 35 % of the foundry’s production was extremely low and Qualcomm pulled out its business from the Samsung Foundry. Instead, he re -worked the chip set and made it as Snapdragon 8 General 1+ by TSMC. Since then, Qualcomm has specially relied on TSMC to produce its flagship Snapdragon 8 SOC.
Extreme ultra -violet lithography machine helped to take chip production under 5nm. | Image Credit- ASML
Although TSMC is clearly the most reliable demand foundry, the Samsung Foundry is another of the era. Fasting behind Samsung is China’s SMIC, which is the third largest foundry in the world. Due to the US and Dutch restrictions, SMIC is not allowed to buy the highly ultra -violet lathaography (EUV) machine used for transfer of circular samples to silicon waifers using thin lines from human hair. EUV machines allow billions of transplants to replace these semiconductors. The SMIC is allegedly using the old deep ultra -violet lithography (DUV) machines, purchased before the sanctions hit, which is for the construction of a new 5 NM carrine X90 chip of Huawei used to make the Metbook Pro Laptop. The foundry also uses a variety of impressions in an attempt to meet the shortage of machine. However, as a result, such chips provide low cost and higher prices. Nevertheless, SMIC is ready to make 5NM and 7NM chips for the Chinese Automotive Manufacturing Sector, which will have another blow to the Samsung Foundry that is doing a sharp business by making such chips for these Chinese -based firms. Next year, with 2 NM chips coming to smartphones, the iPhone 17 will be more well than TSMC, 2026.
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