Samsung Foundry on Track for 2nm Production in 2025

On the heels of the TSMC Symposium and the Intel Foundry update, Samsung held their Foundry Forum today live in Silicon Valley. As usual it was a well attended event with hundreds of people and dozens of ecosystem partners. The theme was the AI Era which is appropriate. As I have mentioned before, AI will touch most every chip and there will never be enough performance or integrated memory so leading edge process and packaging technology is foundry critical, absolutely.

“Samsung Foundry has always met customer needs by being ahead of the technology innovation curve and today we are confident that our gate-all-around (GAA)-based advanced node technology will be instrumental in supporting the needs of our customers using AI applications,” said Dr. Siyoung Choi, president and head of Foundry Business at Samsung Electronics. “Ensuring the success of our customers is the most central value to our foundry services.”

The Samsung Foundry market breakdown for 2022 was not surprising:

Mobile 39%
HPC 32%
IoT 10%
Consumer 9%

Moving forward however HPC is expected to dominate the foundry business ( > 40% ) as AI takes more than their fair share of leading edge wafers.

The most significant announcement was that Samsung 2nm is on track to start production in 2025, which was the date given at the previous Samsung Foundry Forum. Staying on track with the published roadmap is a big part of foundry trust. Remember, if a fabless company is going to bet their company jewels on a foundry partnership they have to trust that the wafers will be delivered on time matching the PDK specifications.

Highlights include:

Expanded applications of its 2-nanometer (nm) process and specialty process
Expanded production capacity at its Pyeongtaek fab Line 3
Launched a new ‘Multi-Die Integration (MDI) Alliance’ for next-generation packaging technology

At the event, Samsung announced detailed plans for the mass production of its 2nm (horizontal nanosheet) process, as well as performance levels. Samsung, like Intel, are their own foundry customer so first production is with internal products versus external foundry customers. This of course is the advantage of an IDM foundry, developing your own silicon in concert with process technologies. Samsung has the added advantage of developing leading edge memories.

Samsung will begin mass production of the 2nm process for mobile applications in 2025, and then expand to HPC in 2026 with backside power delivery, and automotive in 2027. Samsung’s 2nm (SF2) process has shown a 12% increase in performance, a 25% increase in power efficiency, and a 5% decrease in area, when compared to its 3nm process (SF3). Mass production of the follow-on 1.4nm is slated for 2027.

TSMC overwhelming won the 3nm node with the N3X process family, however, the 2nm node is undecided. TSMC N2, Intel 18A, and Samsung 2nm are very competitive on paper and should be ready for external customers in the same time frame. It will all depend on how the PDKs proceed. According to the ecosystem, customers are looking at all three processes so it is a three horse race which is great for the foundry business. No one enjoys a one horse race except for that one horse.

The other big announcement was packaging, another advantage of an IDM foundry. Intel and Samsung have been packaging chips before foundries existed. Now they are opening up their packaging expertise to external foundry customers. We will be writing more about packaging later but it is a very big opportunity for foundries to empower customers.

For packaging Samsung announced the MDI Alliance in collaboration with partner companies as well as major players in 2.5D and 3D, memory, substrate packaging, and testing. Packaging is now a very important part of the foundry business. With the advent of chiplets and the ability to mix and match die from different processes and foundries, packaging is a new foundry arms race and it is good to see three strong horses competing for our business.

This was an excellent networking event, the food is always great, and the Samsung people are very polite and professional. Samsung Foundry will be at DAC 2023 in San Francisco the week of July 9th. I hope to see you there.