Will companies that give up the R&D of chips below 10nm regret it? GF UMC may face a dilemma
You know, there are currently only four factories in the world that use processes smaller than 10 nanometers.
Intel (USA), Samsung (SK) (South Korea), SMIC Manufacturing Co., Ltd.), Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd.*TSMC) and other chipmakers are still working at 10nm and above.
Even the world's third-largest chip foundry does not have more than 10nm process technology.
In fact, back in 2017 and 2018, they decided to abandon the sub-10nm process.
According to him, processes smaller than 10 nanometers are the limit. And the investment in advanced processes is huge: 10 nanometer processes require 5 billion or even 10 billion yuan.
As for GE-Semiconductor and United Core Semiconductor, they have an annual turnover of only a few billion dollars and can't even build production lines, let alone advanced technology.
Needless to say, this is a conservative approach because the industry disapproves of advanced processes below 10nm, believing that chip development above 10nm will be very difficult because the market is too small to support so many factories and Moore's Law is no longer valid, so there is no need to look for a more superior process.
However, with the advancement of the chip production process, Moore's Law does not seem to be completely obsolete, and this strategy seems somewhat conservative.
A few days ago, GF announced that many of its customers are using 7nm or even 5nm processes, which means that GF has fewer and fewer orders, and GF has been working on 10nm, 7nm and 5nm processes in the hope of evaluating them before launching advanced processes.
UMC also supports the same sentiment, stating that 14nm is a more advanced process and will not be upgraded to 10nm.
However, when they realized that their customers needed 10nm and 7nm processes, they started taking orders for 10nm and 7nm processes, and their customers, all of them shifted their orders to 10nm and 7nm processes.
It can be seen that SMIC and UMC are eating"Regret medicine"I don't want to stick to mature technology and plan to explore more advanced technology, but this is just a plan, and no one can say whether it can be implemented.
But there's no doubt that since 10nm and 7nm processes are no longer state-of-the-art, more manufacturers will join the ranks of sub-10nm processes in the future.