Samsung Electronics Co announced an aggressive five-year plan to lure US chip buyers with more advanced technology, aiming to produce transistors that are just 1.4 nanometers wide by 2027.
The company’s chip contract-manufacturing unit — known as a foundry — is looking to triple its revenue by that year from last year’s level, Samsung executive vice president Kang Moon-soo told a briefing in San Jose, California, on Monday.
To get there, the business would need to make several technological leaps and further inroads in the US market for outsourced chips.
Photo: AFP
Samsung shares yesterday rose 4 percent in Seoul after falling by almost one-third this year with rising costs and a downturn in the memory market.
The company is the world’s largest chipmaker by revenue, but its foundry business is playing catchup with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which has a commanding lead in the market and top-of-the-line production capabilities. Samsung recently lost out to TSMC on an Nvidia Corp order to produce the RTX 40 series of graphics cards, which moved to a 4-nanometer process.
Originally a latecomer to the foundry business, Samsung has been in a hurry to advance its technology ahead of expanding capacity. The South Korean chipmaker now sees its 3 nanometer chip process as its “game changer,” Kang said.
It first started production at that node ahead of TSMC.
Samsung is pouring three times more resources into 3 nanometer production than it did with previous tech generations in an effort to meet client demand.
At the briefing, Samsung executives said the company’s yields — the percentage of functioning chips per production run — are now among the best in the industry. It is also racing to stay on the cutting edge of technology.
The company aims to take the lead in advanced chipmaking by starting mass production of second-generation 3 nanometer chips in 2024 and then 2 nanometer parts in 2025. That would set the stage for the 1.4 nanometer products two years later.
Part of Samsung’s pitch to American customers is its decision to manufacture in the US. Samsung has an existing plant in Austin, Texas, and is building one in the nearby city of Taylor. That new plant, which is set to begin operations in 2024, is likely to use the latest production methods, such as 3 nanometer technology.
Samsung also aims to triple its capacity of leading-edge manufacturing by 2027. It has no plans to add to its limited availability of older types of production.
However, TSMC is also beefing up its US presence, and Intel Corp, which Samsung overtook to become the world’s biggest chipmaker, is adding capacity in the US and Europe — part of an effort to balance the industry’s heavy reliance on Asian manufacturing.
Samsung could become an even bigger manufacturer in Texas if needed, Kang said.
The company has secured enough sites in the region to let it grow to meet demand.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
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