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Samsung Fab Line

Samsung has issued updates for its own foundry roadmap and processes, making it an excellent fourth dimension to revisit what the visitor is planning to gyre out in the next few years. The foundry industry has been rocked in contempo weeks past GlobalFoundries' announcement that it would go out the leading edge and focus instead on building out its legacy node business and on niche offerings for IoT, automotive, and RF via its FD-SOI applied science, marketed every bit 22FDX and 12FDX. That leaves just 3 companies — Samsung, TSMC, and Intel — competing for time to come semiconductor designs. What will Samsung bring to the tabular array?

Samsung will first scroll out an 8nm node based on its 10nm technology, Anandtech reports. This node, dubbed 8LPU (Low Power Ultimate) volition focus on chips that require both a high clock and high transistor density. The tweaked node can deliver 10 percent improved dice area (at the aforementioned complication) or 10 percent lower ability consumption (at the same frequency and complication). 8LPU is intended as a stepping stone for customers who want a larger advantage than Samsung's 10nm currently offers, but who tin't afford or don't take access to the visitor's 7nm applied science.

And speaking of 7nm (and past extension, Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography, or EUV), Samsung is also piloting production of its own 7nm chips, though only for cocky-utilise. 7nm LPP, which uses EUV, isn't beingness offered to other customers even so. The reason we refer to overall EUV product as limited, however, is because right at present, the just EUV capacity the visitor has to offering has been installed at Fab S3, in Hwaseong, Republic of korea. The technology will only be used for limited features at showtime and simply for select customers, including Samsung Electronics and Qualcomm'south Snapdragon 5G SoC.

EUV usage will exist expanded over time at the dedicated EUV fab line that Samsung is building, merely that facility isn't expected to exist completed until 2022, with HVM in 2022. But even every bit Samsung is scaling upwards EUV to HVM in 2022, it wants to offer new 5nm and 4nm nodes for risk production in 2022. By 2022, it wants to have a 3nm GAA (Gate All Around) solution in risk product. That's a total twelvemonth earlier than previously estimated. But the implication of this is that 5nm may be a follow-up from 8nm without EUV, while Samsung'south 4nm is an EUV-capable continuation of its 7nm. Both 5nm and 4nm volition employ FinFETs, but they'll be the last Samsung nodes to practise so before transitioning to GAA (Gate-All-around).

SamsungRoadmap

Equally ever with foundry plans, I recommend reading them with an eye towards the phenomenal difficulty of node transitions. Samsung is playing a confident hand by moving GAA and 3nm technology both in by nearly a year, only anyone tin brand a slide deck. Actually delivering these nodes is far more difficult, and the recent bug at both Intel and GlobalFoundries speak to an underlying truth: As it becomes harder and harder to transition between nodes, delays are going to happen. This is non to suggest that Samsung won't execute its roadmap, but that nosotros shouldn't be surprised (or read too much into it) if the company's timeline slips in some particular. Having aggressively pulled 3nm and GAA in, it wouldn't exist surprising if they wind up pushed back out.

Every bit for EUV, Samsung's remarks strengthen our own argument from earlier this calendar week. EUV is an important technology and it matters to the foundry business, but information technology isn't going to roll out all at once, and fifty-fifty a delay from Intel on its own deployment to correspond with a later process node may not have much bear upon on relative product strength. What volition ultimately affair is how much Intel is using EUV for manufacturing when information technology does deploy it, relative to wherever TSMC and Samsung are in their own respective ramps at that time.

At present Read: GlobalFoundries Departing the Leading Edge is an Ominous Sign for Foundry Industry, Intel Won't Deploy EUV Until 2022, and Samsung Wants to Lead the Foundry Manufacture to 4nm and Beyond