Yesterday, TSMC held its technology symposium in Taiwan where its CEO CC Wei revealed some interesting progress with the company’s 7nm process technology. Before now, there have been rumors that TSMC’s 7nm production yield rate is moving at a slow pace but Mr. Wei debunked that. He stated that the company has started commercial production of its 7nm chips and it will move into 5nm chips by the end of 2019 or early 2020.
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According to the CEO, the company will develop over 50 chip designs with its 7nm process technology by the end of 2018. AI, GPU, cryptocurrency applications, and 5G will claim a majority of these designs and TSMC will also start taping out chips built using an enhanced 7nm node with EUV in the second half of 2018. Mr. Wei said that this will boost TSMC’s overall production capacity to 12 million units in 2018, up 9% from 10.5 million units in 2017.
AMD, Bitmain, Nvidia, Qualcomm and a few others have placed orders for TSMC’s 7nm chip and most of these deals will be executed in the first half of 2019. The 5nm process development will require at least $25 billion and mass production is expected to commence at the start of 2020.
