TSMC is ramping into 3nm as soon as possible, with the Taiwanese semiconductor giant spending $20 billion on a next-gen 3nm manufacturing plant, so that it can keep customers like Apple happy in the future.
Samsung and Intel have been in the fab game for a while now, but TSMC has been spending around $10 billion per year in order to keep up to, or exceed what their two main competitors are doing. TSMC has announced its building a next-gen 3nm technology plant in Southern Taiwan, but to put it into perspective... 1nm is one billionth of a meter, and measures the width of each transistor in the chip. It's an incredibly intricate process, with TSMC leading the world in many ways.
Popular Now: Radeon RX 9070 XT is now AMD's most popular GPU, surpassing every RDNA 3 and RDNA 2 cardMorris Chang, founder of TSMC and 86-year-old ultimate boss of the company said: "By the time we're through, by the time we've built all the necessary capacity, I think we would have spent upwards of $15 billion. That's a conservative estimate. Maybe it's safer to say upwards of $20 billion". Don't worry, TSMC won't be going out of business any time soon, as his company is worth a whopping $190 billion.
- Read more: TSMC begins work on 'world's most advanced' chip fab, costs $48.5 billion for 1.4nm production
- Read more: TSMC's new 2nm node progressing smoothly: matching 5nm, surpassing 3nm, 7nm at similar stages
- Read more: TSMC's first customer for next-gen A16 process is NVIDIA, Apple skips A16 directly to A14 node
TSMC's new 3nm plant will be ready by 2022, so expect next-gen Apple smartphones and tablets to rock TSMC's upcoming 3nm node sometime after 2022. 3nm will usher in a 3x reduction in semiconductor size, giving us faster processors that use less power. We should expect quite a leap in smartphone battery life with 3nm, which is the part I'm looking forward to most.
