Samsung's ambitious 3 nm silicon fabrication node that leverages the Gate All Around FET transistors, has reportedly been delayed to 2024. The company brands this specific node as 3GAE. 2024 is the earliest date when Samsung will be able to mass-produce chips on 3GAE, which means the company, along with Intel, will begin to fall significantly behind TSMC on foundry technology. The Taiwanese semiconductor fabrication giant will target 2 nm-class nodes around 2024, which leverages EUV multi-patterning, extensive use of cobalt in contacts and interconnects, germanium doped channels, and other in-house innovations. With Intel's foundry technology development slowing to a crawl in the sub-10 nm domain, Samsung is the only viable alternative to TSMC for cutting-edge logic chip manufacturing.

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a world leader in advanced semiconductor technology, today announced the immediate availability of its next-generation 2.5D packaging technology Interposer-Cube4 (I-Cube4), leading the evolution of chip packaging technology once again. Samsung's I-CubeTM is a heterogeneous integration technology that horizontally places one or more logic dies (CPU, GPU, etc.) and several High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) dies on top of a silicon interposer, making multiple dies operate as a single chip in one package.

Samsung's new I-Cube4, which incorporates four HBMs and one logic die, was developed in March as the successor of I-Cube2. From high-performance computing (HPC) to AI, 5G, cloud and large data center applications, I-Cube4 is expected to bring another level of fast communication and power efficiency between logic and memory through heterogeneous integration.

Industry specialists with various analysis groups have stated that they expect the world's current chip supply shortages to not only fail to be mitigated in the first half of 2021, but that they might actually last well into 2022. It's not just a matter of existing chip supply being diverted by scalpers, miners, or other secondary-market funnels; it's a matter of fundamental lack of resources and production capacity to meet demand throughout various quadrants of the semiconductor industry. With the increased demand due to COVID-19 and the overall increasingly complex design of modern chips - and increased abundance of individual chips within the same products - foundries aren't being able to scale their capacity to meet growing demand.

As we know, the timeframe between start and finish of a given semiconductor chip can sometimes take months. And foundries have had to extend their lead times (the time between a client placing an order and that order being fulfilled) already. This happens as a way to better plan out their capacity allocation, and due to the increased complexity of installing, testing, and putting to production increasingly complex chip designs and fabrication technologies. And analysts with J.P. Morgan and Susquehanna that are in touch with the pulse of the semiconductor industry say that current demand levels are 10% to 30% higher than those that can be satisfied by the fabrication and supply subsystems for fulfilling that demand.