According to industry sources, the TSMC company is considering the possibility of reducing the prices for the production of chips according to the norms of the 3-nanometer technological process in order to stimulate demand from the designers of processors.
Although the TSMC N3 family of manufacturing processes (3-nm class) offers a number of advantages in terms of performance and power consumption, the very high cost prevents their widespread adoption. Therefore, it is not surprising that the company is ready to reduce the cost of its production services in order to further interest customers.
TSMC’s manufacturing costs for the N3E process are likely to be lower than the original N3 process. It is currently unknown what the company will charge for production on other N3-class nodes such as N3P, N3S and N3X. Lower prices for 3nm manufacturing will attract more customers to these nodes, but it won’t happen immediately.
According to unconfirmed reports, TSMC’s initial production technology N3 (also known as N3B) is used only by Apple, since this company is the largest customer ready to implement advanced nodes before others. But N3 is an expensive technology. According to China Renaissance, the N3 makes extensive use of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography up to 25 layers, and each EUV scanner now costs between $150 million and $200 million, depending on the configuration. To cover the depreciation costs of factories equipped with such production tools, TSMC has to charge a higher production fee for the N3 process and its successors.
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Some sources claim that TSMC could charge customers up to $20,000 for an N3 wafer compared to $16,000 for an N5 wafer. While prices depend on many factors, the key takeaway is that chip production continues to get more expensive. And increased costs are driving down profits for companies such as AMD, Broadcom, MediaTek, NVIDIA and Qualcomm. Analysts expect a significant increase in the production of chips based on the N3 class technology to occur in the second half of 2023, when the optimized version of N3E will be ready. It is she who can attract customers to transfer their chips to an advanced technical process.
The N3E process uses EUV for only 19 layers and is slightly less complex in terms of production and therefore cheaper to use. Therefore, TSMC will be able to reduce the cost of its services without compromising profitability in order to attract customers to the new technology.
AMD has publicly announced that it plans to use the N3 node for some developments based on the Zen 5 architecture, which should appear in 2024. NVIDIA is also expected to switch to N3 for the production of its next-generation GPUs based on the Blackwell architecture, which should appear around the same time. It was assumed that, due to the high cost, the use of the N3 technology process would be limited to expensive top-end devices. However, lower manufacturing costs are likely to force chipmakers to rethink their deployment strategy.
Source: tomshardware
