To increase productivity, more lithography machines need to be purchased.
Each lithography machine required for the 7nm EUV process requires US $ 120 million. TSMC will increase to US $ 16 billion in 2020, the company ’s highest capital expenditure so far, and TSMC previously planned to acquire EUV light. Engraving machine manufacturer ASML.
If such a ban really works, In the short term, TSMC will lose the big customer Hisense, which will affect cash flow. In the long run, this will also cause TSMC’s R & D stall.
Is there a spare tire?
If things really reach this point, who should Huawei HiSilicon look for?
First, we will return to China. SMIC won an order for Huawei’s 14nm at the beginning of this year. In the third quarter of last year, SMIC successfully achieved mass production of the first-generation 14nm FinFET process. And successfully won the order from TSMC Nanjing plant, Hisense, 12 nm entered the customer introduction phase this year.
14nm is obviously not applicable to smart phone and other equipment vendors. At present, this process is mainly used for high-end AP / SoC, GPU, mining machine ASIC, Internet of things, car machine, etc.
The 14 nm process is currently the most advanced process in China, but it is at least two generations behind TSMC. TSMC will enter the 5nm era this year.
So, what about Samsung? According to the current news, the US side did not mention foundries other than TSMC. Among the current global foundries, only TSMC and Samsung have process technologies of 7 nm and below.
But Hisilicon has been getting farther away from Samsung in recent years. In 2018, there were rumors that Hisense’s mid-range mobile soc Kirin 710 will be manufactured by Samsung and process 10nm LPP. The reason is TSMC’s foundry costs are higher.
However, when the final product was released, HiSilicon still used TSMC’s 12 nm manufacturing process. Samsung’s process was more advanced and the price was lower, but it still failed to grab HiSilicon’s orders.
Since then, HiSilicon’s chips on mobile phones have been handed over to TSMC, such as Kirin 990, the latest flagship chip of last year, which uses TSMC.TSMC’s latest 7nm + EUV technology, and the baseband chip Balong and NB-IoT chip Boudica150 are also manufactured by TSMC.
Samsung also tried to catch up with TSMC and gave out ambitious price concessions and other strategies. At the “System Semiconductor Vision Oath” held at the Hwaseong Plant in South Korea in April 2019, Samsung announced that it would invest a lot of money. Hope In 2030, it won the top spot in global system semiconductors; and Hisilicon’s old rival, Qualcomm, handed the Snapdragon 865 to Samsung.
But there is not much cooperation between HiSilicon and Samsung at present, and if TSMC really cut off the cooperation with HiSilicon, then choosing Samsung is not a secure solution.
In general, if things really develop to the point where TSMC’s supply is cut off, Huawei Hisilicon’s high-end chips (mainly concentrated on smartphones) will be greatly affected, and no alternative can be found in a short time.
TSMC lost customers and Huawei Hisilicon lost technology. At the same time, this will also disrupt the normal development of the global semiconductor industry. This is obviously a result of over-loss.