Samsung Electronics Plans To Develop 1.4nm Chips From 2027

Recently, Samsung Electronics held the “Samsung Foundry Forum 2022 Event” and showcased new foundry technology and commercial plans. Five hundred people attended the Samsung Foundry Forum this year, which was held offline for the first time in three years. These attendees included fabless clients, business partners, and partners.

On Monday, Samsung Electronics revealed a five-year plan for its contract chipmaking division, announcing that it would begin producing chips in 2025 using 2-nanometer technology and in 2027 using 1.4-nanometer technology. At the same time as process innovation, the company is accelerating the development of 2.5D/3D heterogeneous integration packaging technology.

Along with these innovations, Samsung is also working on another no less important piece, which is the heterogeneous integration of 2.5D/3D package chips. In that sense, the company has announced that the X-Cube 3D packaging technology with micro-bump interconnections “will be ready for production in volumes in 2024, while the bumpless version of the X-Cube will become available in 2026.”

All of these innovations will serve as the basis for a ‘custom and tailored’ production offering that meets customer needs, not just in-house needs. Samsung, for example, will “improve the 3nm GAA process to better support the HPC and mobile industries, further diversifying the specialized 4nm process for HPC and automotive applications.”

Speaking of the automotive sector, Samsung is currently offering market memory solutions (eNVM, embedded non-volatile memory) made at a 28 nm process. Still, it plans to provide 14 nm and 8 nm eNVM in 2024 and 2028, respectively. In addition, Samsung has mass-produced 8 nm RF solutions while working on 5 nm concepts.

To do this, Samsung is building a new Fab in Taylor, Texas, parallel upgrading the other production lines in South Korea in Giheung, Hwaseong and Pyeongtaek. At the same time, in the US, it is already present in Austin and Taylor.

During the event, Dr Si-young Choi also illustrated the ‘Shell-First’ strategy to speed up investment in production capacity. What does it consist of? In practice, Samsung decided to “build the clean rooms ahead of time, regardless of market conditions.” With clean rooms readily available, ‘manitive machinery can be installed at a later date and flexibly configured according to future demand’.

The Samsung Foundry Forum 2022, held in San Jose (United States) in the past few hours, will land in Europe (in Munich, Germany) on October 7 and then arrive in Japan (October 18) and South Korea (October 20). On those dates, perhaps, we will learn more about the company’s production technologies and specific plans for each individual region.