Qualcomm to give all its 3nm AP foundry work to TSMC instead of Samsung

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www.thelec.net, Feb. 23, 2022 – 

Qualcomm has given the foundry order for its 3-nanometer (nm) application processor launching next year exclusively to TSMC, TheElec has learned.

The US chip giant has also given some of the foundry work for its 4nm application processor, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, to the Taiwanese chip giant, which it previously gave solely to Samsung Electronics, sources said.

TSMC, after receiving the order last year, has already put in the wafers for the chips that will be delivered to customers during the second quarter, they said.

Qualcomm made the decision to rely on TSMC more than Samsung as the latter is facing yield problems for its advanced process nodes, the sources said.

Samsung Foundry, the Korean tech giant's contract chip-making business unit, is seeing a yield rate of around 35% for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, while the yield rate for Exynos 2200 is even lower than this, they added.

The higher yield on Snapdragon compared to Exynos was due to Qualcomm sending an executive and engineers to Samsung Foundry's production site, which helped with solving some of the problems, one of the sources said.

But Qualcomm decided to add TSMC as a foundry for the chip as well as it believed it couldn't sit back when the yield is so low amid the global chip shortage, they said.

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