Samsung's 5nm process has problems, Snapdragon 875 turns to TSMC

 According to Taiwan media Economic Daily, the market has heard that Samsung's orders for mobile phone chip giant Qualcomm using a 5nm process may have some problems, so Qualcomm urgently asked TSMC for help in July. The company's X60 baseband and flagship processor chip Snapdragon 875 were originally put into production at Samsung, and will subsequently increase the version produced at TSMC, and plan to start production from the second half of 2021. 

It was previously reported that the orders for Snapdragon 875 and X60 had been awarded to TSMC, but industry insiders pointed out that the aforementioned news was wrong. In fact, the relevant orders were given to Samsung, but some problems occurred recently, which led Qualcomm to ask TSMC for help. However, TSMC has never commented on the status of customer orders, and Qualcomm has not commented on this news for the time being.

Industry insiders mentioned that TSMC's 5nm process capacity is currently full, and there are still some orders for HiSilicon in the third quarter, most of which are reserved for Apple, and almost all of them are taken by Apple in the fourth quarter. In the first quarter of next year, in addition to Apple, it will also start to produce some orders from AMD.

In addition, industry insiders said that TSMC's 5nm process production capacity should continue to expand.

Qualcomm previously commissioned TSMC and Samsung to produce different products of the same period. For example, the flagship processor chip Snapdragon 865 and the baseband chip X55 are both produced by TSMC, while Qualcomm's first 5G system-on-chip Snapdragon 765 is produced by Samsung. Regarding the above-mentioned dual foundry partner strategy, Qualcomm previously stated that based on commercial considerations, it chose to have two foundry companies produce mainly in the hope of having sufficient supply.