Samsung Electronics’ Foundry Division has allegedly secured advanced process node contracts with fabless chipmakers NVIDIA, Qualcomm, IBM, and Baidu. Expected to commence in 2024, the Korean foundry will supply the chipmakers with 3nm wafers after a disastrous 5nm process node. All prominent American IC designers, including AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and MediaTek, ditched Samsung in favor of TSMC’s N5 or N4 node.
NVIDIA leveraged Samsung’s 8nm LPP node to fab its GeForce RTX 30 series GPUs, while Qualcomm tapped into the 5nm/4nm LPE process for its Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 SoC. Apart from that, the bulk of fabless contracts has fallen into TSMC’s laps. Intel has adopted the N6 and N5 nodes for its Arc GPUs and 14th Gen iGPU tiles, respectively.
According to the report, the 3nm process has been in development for nearly two years and is slated to ship sometime in 2024. It’s worth noting that, unlike TSMC’s N3, Samsung’s 3nm process will leverage the more advanced GAA transistors instead of FinFET. Samsung has reportedly signed contracts with up to six American and Chinese fabless chipmakers to manufacture their next-gen processors. Qualcomm and NVIDIA have maintained their dual-foundry approach for some time now and will likely partner with the Korean giant in the next cycle.
Source: Hankyung
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