April 18, according to foreign media reports, South Korea's Samsung foundry sector previously demonstrated its progress in the 3nm node GAA technology, the current 3nm yield is only maintained at between 10% to 20%.
This number compares to the 4nm process that won an order for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 mobile processor, although 4nm has a higher 35% yield. But compared to TSMC’s 4 nm yield of 70%, this is still a bad number.
The foreign media “wccftech” reported that it is because the Samsung foundry department in the 4 nm process yield of only 35%, which made Qualcomm painfully resolved to Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 + two flagship processor foundry orders, urgent by Samsung to transfer the order to TSMC to carry out foundry production. As for Samsung’s upcoming mass production of the 3 nm process, it is expected that in the future, without a significant increase in yield, even if it has to pay higher production costs, Qualcomm will still hand over the next generation of its flagship action processor Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 to TSMC instead of Samsung.
The newspaper quoted sources as saying that Samsung’s 3 nm process is now being used to produce the company’s own internal wafers, which may be used to produce the Exynos series of action processors. Because there is news that Samsung is developing a new Exynos action processor for its future Galaxy series of smartphones, it was not sure if these products would be built using the 3 nm process of GAA technology.
There is also no word on whether Samsung’s competitor TSMC has encountered the same problems as Samsung in moving to GAA technology. However, past experience shows that TSMC has consistently produced better quality chips than its foundry competitors, which has led to huge technology companies like Apple continuing to order TSMC to produce a large number of their processor orders every year. Moreover, the world’s first mobile processor, MediaTek’s Tiangui 9000, built on TSMC’s 4 nm process, has been tested to be the best mobile processor in the non-Apple category, directly demonstrating TSMC’s superior process technology and how it helps processors deliver a competitive advantage in terms of performance and power efficiency.
