Samsung's Chip-Fab Could Dominate the World Soon; Even Qualcomm & NVIDIA Might Turn to Them

[dgstorm]

It's easy to focus on all of the different retail products that Samsung offers and forget that they also are one of the biggest fabrication manufacturers on the planet. Very soon they may become even more powerful as they work toward global domination of the chip fab world.

According to a new report, Samsung is so far ahead of everyone else with their chip manufacturing process that even their competitors are turning to them to make their chips. Most of us probably already know that Apple has been one of Samsung's biggest customers for quite some time, as Samsung fabricates the chips which go into most of Apple's products. What is truly shocking is that both Qualcomm and NVIDIA may soon be turning to Samsung to manufacturer their chipsets as well.

Supposedly Samsung jumped ahead of everyone else by perfecting their 14nm FinFET production process, while the competition is stuck still in a new roll out of their 16nm process and mostly just ramping up mass production of last year's 20nm process. Here's a quote with a few of the details,

...Hence, we might be seeing Samsung mass-producing and supplying chips to Apple, Qualcomm, and Nvidia from the second quarter of 2015. As Samsung is pulling chip-making rival TSMC's business from under the table, analysts are projecting "stellar performance" for its semiconductor division. Last year, Sammy's processor arm racked up fourth quarter financial results that equal those of two of its other divisions combined. It looks like things will only escalate from here.

Samsung's Exynos 7420 64-bit octa-core SoC is their first chip based upon this improved manufacturing process and should be more power efficient and put out less heat than anyone else in the industry. We will see if that proves true as soon as Samsung's next flagship, the Galaxy S6, hits the retail market.

It will be interesting to see if this turns out to be true, and Samsung starts making everyone's chipsets for them. Their biggest competitor in this sector, TSMC, must be crying right now...

Source: PhoneArena

 

[Ollie]

They are building a $15 billion factory right now in Korea. I'm not sure if it is for chips or drams though. Reports are sketchy.

 

[boidsonly]

I, for one, am glad to see them take some of the Red China's business...

 

[VirtualCLD]

Supposedly Samsung jumped ahead of everyone else by perfecting their 14nm FinFET production process, while the competition is stuck still in a new roll out of their 16nm process and mostly just ramping up mass production of last year's 20nm process. Here's a quote with a few of the details.

From what little rumors I have heard within the IC industry, this seems to be the case. In related and belated news, IBM sold off their foundry business to Global Foundries (which itself was spun-off AMD, i.e. former AMD foundries). IBM is still maintaining R&D work into future/advanced process nodes for a path forward to beyond 14nm, but they will be sharing this with GF. As a bit of background, Samsung, Global Foundries and IBM had formed the Common Platform. They co-developed new process technologies which means all of their foundries use (roughly) the same technology (i.e. 90nm CMOS, 65nm CMOS & SOI, 45nm SOI, 32nm SOI, 22nm SOI). They have been working together on 14nm FinFET (bear in mind that Intel FinFET may not be the same type of device as IBM, GF and Samsung FinFET) for quite some time. I suspect that implicit with IBM's agreement to share R&D results with GF is that Samsung will gain that knowledge too, through the Common Platform collaboration.

 

[Jeffrey]

They are building a $15 billion factory right now in Korea. I'm not sure if it is for chips or drams though. Reports are sketchy.

cNet reported last year that it is for chips..
They are also building a new 3Billion $$ Smartphone factory.