Industry insiders reveal that TSMC is researching decreasing costs of 3nm process technology to acquire more clients like AMD & NVIDIA
The difficulty TSMC is facing now is the cost of manufacturing the new N3 technology. N3 utilizes EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography within twenty-five layers, and EUV scanners, depending on the configuration, can cost between $150 million to $200 million, according to China Renaissance Capital Group. And the foundry price of 3nm technology surpasses $20,000 for each wafer. AMD has previously mentioned that the company intends to utilize the 3nm process for the Zen 5 microarchitecture, but this won’t happen until the second half of 2024 at the earliest, while NVIDIA is aiming to use the N3 technology in its future Blackwell-based graphics cards. Liu Deyin, CEO of TSMC, has reported that the logic density of the fab process for 3nm will heighten to sixty percent, with power consumption levels lowering by as much as thirty-five percent at identical speeds. One of TSMC’s N3 process nodes, the N3E, currently utilizes EUV lithography in only 19 layers. This lowers the overhead for manufacturing as the production is less complex and leads to lower costs than other process nodes, such as N3P, N3S, and N3X processes. It is also less risky to decrease the purchasing price as the manufacturing is not as intensive. And, with no apparent benefit in SRAM cell scaling compared to the N5 process technology, increased sizes for the chip dies would be present in both N3 and N3B process technologies. — Szeho Ng, analyst, China Renaissance Capital Group It is likely that NVIDIA might utilize 3nm for its next-gen Blackwell GPU architecture while AMD will utilize it for the next-generation Zen 5 and RDNA 4 core IPs. News Sources: Tom’s Hardware, MyDrivers, China Renaissance Capital Group
