Discussion Leading Edge Foundry Node advances (TSMC, Samsung Foundry, Intel) - [2020 - 2025]

[DisEnchantment]

TSMC's N7 EUV is now in its second year of production and N5 is contributing to revenue for TSMC this quarter. N3 is scheduled for 2022 and I believe they have a good chance to reach that target.


N7 performance is more or less understood.


This year and next year TSMC is mainly increasing capacity to meet demands.

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For Samsung the nodes are basically the same from 7LPP to 4 LPE, they just add incremental scaling boosters while the bulk of the tech is the same.

Samsung is already shipping 7LPP and will ship 6LPP in H2. Hopefully they fix any issues if at all.
They have two more intermediate nodes in between before going to 3GAE, most likely 5LPE will ship next year but for 4LPE it will probably be back to back with 3GAA since 3GAA is a parallel development with 7LPP enhancements.

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Samsung's 3GAA will go for HVM in 2022 most likely, similar timeframe to TSMC's N3.
There are major differences in how the transistor will be fabricated due to the GAA but density for sure Samsung will be behind N3.
But there might be advantages for Samsung with regards to power and performance, so it may be better suited for some applications.
But for now we don't know how much of this is true and we can only rely on the marketing material.

This year there should be a lot more available wafers due to lack of demand from Smartphone vendors and increased capacity from TSMC and Samsung.
Lots of SoCs which dont need to be top end will be fabbed with N7 or 7LPP/6LPP instead of N5, so there will be lots of wafers around.

Most of the current 7nm designs are far from the advertized density from TSMC and Samsung. There is still potential for density increase compared to currently shipping products.
N5 is going to be the leading foundry node for the next couple of years.

For a lot of fabless companies out there, the processes and capacity available are quite good.

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[511]

Supposedly sensitive materials have already been seized from his home. He may well have smuggled trade secrets with him when he left TSMC. Whether or not he'd supply such material to Intel is unclear, but it should be obvious to Intel if he attempted to supply such materials to Intel for their advantage.

Yup

Do you think people are playing 5D chess when doing this stuff? Where do you expect people to leave their stuff if not at home? Also why bother selling TSMC stock? You think its going to go down from 1 small thing like this?

I would expect people to use brain and to take this trade secrets with them not leave it at home and his stock is getting Seized lmao so why would not sell it.

I had a PHD boss fired from Unilever for secretly collecting proprietary data at his home with the intention of moving to a local competitor. He and I had many confrontations and was a model of the Peter principle in action.

Except in this case we don't know if he is successful in smuggling stuff also it's not like Intel can use it directly they need to wait for few years to maybe months to use the info.