Friday, September 18th 2020
TSMC 5 nm Node Supply Fully Booked, Apple the Biggest Customer
TSMC has hit a jackpot with its newer nodes like 7 nm and now 5 nm, as the company is working with quite good yields. To boast, TSMC has seen all of its capacity of 7 nm being fully booked by customers like AMD, Apple, and NVIDIA. However, it seems like the company's next-generation 5 nm node is also getting high demand. According to the latest report from DigiTimes, TSMC's N5 5 nm node is fully booked to the end of 2020. And the biggest reason for that is the biggest company in the world - Apple. Since Apple plans to launch the next-generation iPhone, iPad, and Arm-based MacBook, the company has reportedly booked most of the 5 nm capacity for 2020, meaning that there are lots of chips that Apple will consume. TSMC can't be dependent only on one company like Apple, so the smaller portion of capacity went to other customers as well.
Source:
DigiTimes
66 Comments on TSMC 5 nm Node Supply Fully Booked, Apple the Biggest Customer
5 Oct 2018: community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/breakfast-bytes/posts/tsmc-oip-report?pifragment-1779=2
"N5 is ready for design starts. EDA V0.5 certification is done, with V0.9 ongoing (to be complete in November). Foundation IP (standard cells, SRAM, GPIO, eFuse) all have early silicon validation results."
AMD MTS - Sep 2018 – Present
2 years. Hyderabad Area, India. FEINT. Synthesis over 7nm/5nm
"1 year ago" => R&D Engineer, II
Tools: Hsim/ Hspice/ Schematic Capture/ Extraction/ Verilog/Unix
Project/ comments: N5 for Hi Silicon and AMD
N5 for Hi Silicon and AMD
Requirements => Basic know how of SRAM, ROM circuits
Which appears again:
N5 TSMC FINFET, HDSP, UHD2PRF and HDRF2P Testchip and compiler development from scratch for Hi-Silicon and AMD @Synopsys
2013-2018 profile: L2 Macro -5nm FinFET Test Chip Layout
May 2019 - August 2019 profile: Supported L3 Cache Physical Design team -Worked with the TSMC 7nm and 5nm
October 2018 => October 2020 is well within the timeframe given EUV's speed over DUV.
www.dolphin-ic.com/products/standard-cell/tsmc_5ff_cell.html
- 6-track, Ultra High Density (51nm and 57nm poly pitch)
www.dolphin-ic.com/products/standard-cell/tsmc_7ff+_cell.html- 6-track, Ultra High Density (57nm poly pitch)
5nm's 57nm poly-pitch might support retapeouts of 7nm+'s 57nm poly pitch.Timeframe from Matisse/Rome sampling in 2018; one year after risk production of 7nm DUV. Coincides, with the timeframe of Milan/Vermeer A0&B0 sampling in 2020; also one year after risk production of 5nm EUV.
Ex:
hardforum.com/threads/the-radeon-technology-group-rtg-has-received-its-first-zen-2-sample.1967802/
Which is pretty close to => www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-7-3800x
N5 Q1+ 2021 shipments => Mediatek, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Intel (Phase 2 customers)
There is multiple rumors but AMD is the one buying most of N5.
Apple rumor => 45,000 wafers per quarter.
AMD rumor => 60,000 wafers per quarter, till 4Q20 onwards which it is upgraded to 90,000 wafers. (Q4+ is N5 pdk 1.1 aka N5P)
Based on price rumors that is only ~320+ million USD per quarter.
Which is well within AMD's operating expenses => www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMD/amd/operating-expenses
It isn't the first time they paid that much anyway.
techreport.com/news/24026/amd-lowers-wafer-orders-will-pay-320-million-charge/
www.anandtech.com/show/10631/amd-amends-globalfoundries-wafer-supply-agreement-through-2020
TSMC also buys AMD's CPU/GPU products, so there might be a discount for AMD. Do to the symbiotic bond they have now.
Huawei reportedly has only 8.8 million Kirin 9000 chipsets for the Mate 40 smartphones
The 5nm wafer can yield about 400 dies, and TSMC has about 22k wafers.
My money would be on a 3090 killer at some point on 5nm but still RDNA 2 based and also I believe AMD have delay Zen 4 well into 2022 and we will get Zen 3+. AMD pretty much said this with their mobo support list. From memory all orders needed to be completed before October and then the US is deciding for the world which phones we are allowed to buy.
A100/7nm => 6912
GA102/8nm => 10496
Similar source as the above.
AMD got 5nm HVM in Q1 2020. It has been rumored that at least Zen3 and MI100 are 5nm products.
MI100 is the first 5nm product.
Zen3 is the second 5nm product. <== ((Milan-Genesis)00h-derivied dies are N5 and (Trento-Badami)30h-derivied dies are N5P)
Navi31 has replaced Navi21 and will be RDNA2 not RDNA3. 1H of 2021 availability. <== Third 5nm part and is N5P.
GFX1050 => Navi31
GFX1100 => RDNA3/Navi41
Found this on WCCFTech site
But I am also fairly sure we will see Zen 3+ which will be on 5nm because we see Zen 4.
All 7nm+ products are on 5nm.
It all started with a codename list on an AMD profile
7nm/6nm/5nm Renoir/Durango/Rembrandt
Renoir is an APU that has launched
Durango is a name of a city like Bixby/Promontory.
Rembrandt is an APU and it is beside the 5nm.
Rembrandt being 5nm, means Zen3 is on 5nm. Hence, everything 7nm+ is actually 5nm.
Because Rembrandt is 5nm, Cezanne being a later model is also 5nm. Cezanne being 5nm means earlier Zen3 parts are also 5nm.
Which lead to this:
www.dolphin-ic.com/products/standard-cell/tsmc_5ff_cell.html
- 6-track, Ultra High Density (51nm and 57nm poly pitch)
www.dolphin-ic.com/products/standard-cell/tsmc_7ff+_cell.html- 6-track, Ultra High Density (57nm poly pitch)
5nm's 57nm poly-pitch might support retapeouts of 7nm+'s 57nm poly pitch.// Think 14LPP to 12LP or N7 to N6, but N5 does it with N7+.
I believe 7nm+ at Fab 15 is ~10K to ~30K wafer starts currently, there is no demand for it.
While 5nm at Fab 18 in January was 50K wafer starts and March was 80K wafer starts.
We can see literally two fabs(phase 1 & phase 2 of F18A) running on google maps;
I worry that TSMC wouldn't be able to keep up though as the EUV process takes a fair bit longer to complete even though it's simpler with less masking but the power requirements are pretty huge.
Also, this decision will have had to of been made a long time ago because TSMC's 7nm EUV process is not compatible with their 5nm EUV process, so everything will have had to of been designed for 5nm from the start and at that point HiSilicon would have been a massive partner of TSMC and so there wouldn't have been any capacity on 5nm for AMD to use.