Samsung has some major foundry-related announcements lined up for next month. The company plans to unveil its improved 3nm and 4nm chip manufacturing processes at the 2023 Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits. The event is scheduled to take place between June 11 and 16 in Kyoto, Japan.
According to the program details published by the organizers of the six-day event, Samsung will announce its second-generation 3nm process (SF3) during the conference. The company is employing the GAA (Gate-All-Around) fabrication technology in its 3nm chips. The second-gen solution will use more advanced Multi-Bridge-Channel Field-Effect Transistors (MBCFET) with additional optimizations over the current process (SF3E).
Compared to Samsung’s current 4nm EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) chips (aka SF4), which employ the FinFET fabrication tech, SF3 chips bring a 22 percent improvement in speed and are 34 percent more power efficient. These chips also allow for a smaller logic area, with the company claiming a 21 percent decline in chip size. The Korean firm doesn’t detail the difference in speed and power efficiency between SF3 and SF3E 3nm chips, though.
Additionally, Samsung will debut its most upgraded 4nm chips (SF4X) at the VLSI Symposium 2023 next month. These chips will seemingly be targeted at the HPC (High Performance Computing) application. The next-gen solutions will bring a ten percent boost in performance while simultaneously reducing power consumption by 23 percent. “This SF4X
technology provides tremendous performance benefits for various applications in a wide operation range,” the official paper states.
Samsung expects its improved 3nm chips to help boost foundry share
Samsung is desperate to improve its foundry share. The Korean behemoth is the world’s second-largest semiconductor foundry, but it only has a market share of about 15 percent. In comparison, its arch-rival TSMC captures about 60 percent of the market. The company is hoping for 3nm chips to improve its share. It is betting on the use of the more advanced GAA tech to lure customers to its side. TSMC is sticking to the FinFET architecture for one more generation. It plans to switch to the GAA tech with 2nm solutions in 2025.
There are already reports that Samsung has won orders for some of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 chips for next year. Google may also stick to Samsung for the Tensor G4 after briefly considering a switch to TSMC. So early signs are looking quite promising for the Korean behemoth. But only time will tell whether it can get any closer to its Taiwanese rival in the semiconductor foundry business over the next few years.