TSMC’s share of ‘advanced’ silicon

The canard that TSMC makes 90% of the world’s most advanced chips has been taken apart by the industry’s foremost process technology analyst Scotten Jones.

In SemiWiki, Jones points out that that this much-quoted ‘stat’ does not stand up to scrutiny.

Jones takes ‘advanced’ as being processes with densities of  100 million transistors per millimeter squared (MTx/mm2) which is the case with TSMC and Samsung 7nm and Intel 10nm.


Advanced processes are applied to only three product categories – 3DNAND, DRAM, and Logic, says Jones.


Looking at worldwide installed capacity for 3DNAND 96/92L layers and greater, DRAM 1y and smaller and Logic 7nm (10nm) and smaller, Jones sees NAND taking 44% of the total capacity, DRAM taking 38%, TSMC logic taking 12% and other companies’ logic taking 6%.

Looking exclusively at advanced logic capacity –  i.e. for TSMC and Samsung 7nm and Intel 10nm – Jones concludes that TSMC has 64% of worldwide capacity while Samsung and Intel have the other 36%.

“In conclusion, TSMC actually only makes up 12% of worldwide Advanced Silicon and only 64% of Advanced Logic,” concludes  Jones.


Comments

12 comments

  1. The same self defining arguments that political think tanks use. “Pick a card, any card…. “

  2. Lets all remember that 73.9% of all statistics are made up on the spot…..
    Who cares….

  3. If you change the definition to 3nm then TSMC makes 100% of all advanced chips, DontAgree

  4. What if you change the definition from 7nm to 3 or 4nm (in logic)??? I am guessing that may swing the numbers much more in the TSMC direction. Can anyone here answer that question?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*