Samsung announces 3nm manufacturing technology will be delayed until next year

On October 7th, Samsung Electronics announced on Wednesday local time that the company's next-generation 3-nanometer chip manufacturing technology will be postponed to 2022, and said that the more advanced 2-nanometer chip manufacturing technology will be available in 2025.

Samsung had planned to start producing faster and more energy-efficient chips using a 3-nanometer process this year. The company said at the Samsung Foundry Forum on Wednesday that the transition to a new manufacturing technology is difficult and that 3-nanometer chips will be available in the first half of 2022.

This means that Samsung's customers, including mobile chip designer Qualcomm, server maker IBM and Samsung's own products, will not be able to use this cutting-edge technology until next year.

However, the good news is that Samsung announced that it will achieve 2-nanometer chip manufacturing technology in the second half of 2025. Samsung said this will enable chips to continue to move forward in performance, energy efficiency and miniaturization of electronic products.

TSMC also announced in August this year that it would postpone the launch of 3-nanometer chip manufacturing technology. The delay of this plan has relieved the pressure on Intel. Intel is currently launching its own foundry business to regain market share taken away by TSMC and Samsung.

The chip business is under great pressure. With the continuous growth of personal computer sales, the popularity of smartphones and the increasing volume of online services in data centers, the market demand for chips has exceeded production capacity. The global chip shortage has affected the sales of personal computers, game consoles, automobiles and other products that rely on the electronic product supply chain.

Shawn Han, senior vice president of Samsung's foundry business, said the chip shortage will not ease until 2022. He said, "Although we are investing and other foundries are also increasing capacity, we think this situation will continue for another six to nine months."

The process of switching to a new generation of chip manufacturing technology is very complicated. A single chip is made up of billions of transistors smaller than a speck of dust. Chip manufacturing factories need to etch circuit patterns on silicon wafers, a process that requires dozens of steps and takes months.

The progress of chip manufacturing technology comes from the continuous miniaturization of transistors, so that more transistors can be compressed on the chip, thereby increasing processing speed and reducing power consumption. Samsung's next-generation chip manufacturing technology 3GAE uses a technology called "all-around gate transistor" (GAA).

Samsung expects to launch more mature 3GAP chip products while achieving high production volumes by 2023. By 2025, Samsung plans to switch to 2GAP, a more advanced 2-nanometer chip manufacturing technology.

As chips become more complex, they typically also become more expensive, which is why many customers insist on chips made using older, cheaper manufacturing processes from companies like GlobalFoundries.

But Samsung believes it can reduce the cost of the new manufacturing technology. "Although GAA is a difficult technology, we will continue to work hard to reduce the cost of a single transistor," said Moonsoo Kang, head of Samsung Electronics' foundry strategy team. "This trend will continue."