Friday, November 27th 2020
TSMC Completes Its Latest 3 nm Factory, Mass Production in 2022
They say that it is hard to keep up with Moore's Law, however, for the folks over at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), that doesn't seem to represent any kind of a problem. Today, to confirm that TSMC is one of the last warriors for the life of Moore's Law, we have information that the company has completed building its manufacturing facility for the next-generation 3 nm semiconductor node. Located in Southern Taiwan Science Park near Tainan, TSMC is expecting to start high-volume manufacturing of the 3 nm node in that Fab in the second half of 2022. As always, one of the first customers expected is Apple.
Estimated to cost an amazing 19.5 billion US Dollars, the Fab is expected to have an output of 55,000 300 mm (12-inch) wafers per month. Given that the regular facilities of TSMC exceed the capacity of over 100K wafers per month, this new facility is expected to increase the capacity over time and possibly reach the 100K level. The new 3 nm node is going to use the FinFET technology and will deliver a 15% performance gain over the previous 5 nm node, with 30% decreased power use and up to 70% density increase. Of course, all of those factors will depend on a specific design.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
Estimated to cost an amazing 19.5 billion US Dollars, the Fab is expected to have an output of 55,000 300 mm (12-inch) wafers per month. Given that the regular facilities of TSMC exceed the capacity of over 100K wafers per month, this new facility is expected to increase the capacity over time and possibly reach the 100K level. The new 3 nm node is going to use the FinFET technology and will deliver a 15% performance gain over the previous 5 nm node, with 30% decreased power use and up to 70% density increase. Of course, all of those factors will depend on a specific design.
56 Comments on TSMC Completes Its Latest 3 nm Factory, Mass Production in 2022
could you help me estimate number of RDNA2/Zen3 chips per wafer?
Asking fecause:
As far as NVIDIA goes, it could be as low as 35 GA102 dies per wafer out of 79, but those are fully functional and NVIDIA currently only has Quadros using the fully enabled die. My guess is that the yields are probably even worse.
Navi21: 519.8 mm² (28.49 x 18.25 mm)
Die Yield Calculator: caly-technologies.com/die-yield-calculator/
Wafer Diameter for 7nm should be 300mm.
Defect Density was 0.09 last time it leaked, it may have improved but not by much.
Zen3: 694 dies total, 644 good dies (with defect density 0.09)
Navi21: 107 dies total, 68 good dies (with defect density 0.09)
In addition to Zen3 and Navi21, there is the die MI100 is based on that is definitely not small or easy to produce (but I bet is very profitable).
TSMC 7nm capacity is 130K wafers/month, planned to increase to 140K wafers/month by end of 2020.
Based on various news/leak/rumor bits AMD at this point has about 60-65% of that capacity, lets say roughly 80K wafers/month.
- From Sony's planned at least 7 million PS5s manufactured in this year and knowing the rough size of the PS5 APU, they need at least 15K wafers/month to get these manufactured. This is probably an optimistic number, assuming perfect yields (leaks/rumors say are yields are not quite good), 20-25 K wafers/month sounds realistic.
- Xbox is probably in the same range. Microsoft has not been public about the amount manufactured but I bet it will not be much less. Xbox APU is bigger, so less per wafer and probably slightly worse yields. That's another 20-25K wafers/month.
- Since neither Sony nor Microsoft are listed as big TSMC customers, that must be coming out of AMD's 7nm allocation. Basically - half or more of AMD's TSMC 7nm allocation goes to manufacturing console APUs at this point. Numbers are assuming equal manufactured amounts of APUs over 2020-H2.
Edit:
Aaaand... I do read the referenced news bit but do not register any of it somehow.
Wafer amounts in the news:
- 150K/quarter is 50k/month. Less than I expected.
- 120K/quarter - 40k/month. Close enough to what I expected but there are about half as much Xbox APUs produced than PS5.
Apple gets exclusity on all new nodes, for months and months before anyone else can get in
But if we increase the density further? How does that affect cooling capability? And it's up to 70% increase OVER 5NM, not 7nm, which may well further "aggravate the issue".
Are our coolers about to become obsolete due to being unable to deal with the concentration of heat on such small points of the CPUs?
And on "most valuable", Apple needs tens of millions of... quite small chips.
While AMD needs tens of millions of much larger ones. (40 million for consoles alone, and those are 330mm+)
I doubt Apple would use more wafers in 2021 than AMD.Hooooold on, guys. A 300mm wafer costs around $17k.
If one is only after "big boys", it's 17000/68 = 250 bucks just for RDNA2 chip!
Compared to $27 for Zen3.
Yikes. CPUs seem to be vastly overpriced, while pricing of GPUs rather modest.
B) Prices are always high when production starts, and goes down once it ramps up into stable, QA/QC'd mass-production quantities... a known fact for any mfgr, silicon chips or otherwise....
C) With the extremely long lead times required to finance, build and start up a new fab shop, TSMC knows they absolutely CANNOT wait for 7nm, or even 5nm, orders to start declining before they make plans for the next big thing.... they MUST stay ahead of the curve, or risk losing their leading position to someone else...
Yes they will continue producing & selling older/larger nodes until nobody wants any significant qty's of them anymore, but that time is coming sooner rather than later, and they don't wanna be caught unprepared....
as the old saying goes: "Failure to plan on your end does NOT constitute an emergency on ours" hehehehe :roll:
I say: GO TSMC !!!!!
- 7nm ~$10k
- 10nm (Samsung 8N is in this class) $7-8k
- 12-16nm ~$6k
Of course, big customers have some negotiating space for discounts.7-8 times difference in the amount of dies of CPUs and GPUs possibly retrieved from a wafer is no joke. Building a video card is also more complex and expensive than a CPU.
Hell yeah go TSMC. This company is progressing faster and faster every year. I like what TSMC is doing and thumbs up for them.
2) You can build a 28nm or 40nm fab and still make a killer buck on it, there's always market for it and not many entities (e.g. companies or countries) that can build a functioning profitable fab. As an example - Russia still can't scale up 45nm past tiny microcontrollers and NFC chips, that's why Elbrus was built on 65nm and later outsourced to 28nm TSMC. That's regardless of billions in investments and tons of additional govt. money and ridiculous exclusive military contracts, all driven by crazy demand on the local market. Another good example is Allwinner. They still use TSMC's 28nm capacities, and their SoCs are still widely used in STBs, mediaplayers, tablets. Mediatek is always two steps behind in fabrication process, but they are still making the most popular SoCs on smartphone market, only second to Qualcomm.
there's a lot of things that won't benefit much on bleeding edge node, like analog circuit, RF etc