There is TSMC and there's everybody else, can Samsung or Intel catch up?

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The leading edge of semiconductor manufacturing

www.techspot.com, Aug. 28, 2022 – 

There is only one company operating at the leading edge of semiconductor manufacturing and that is TSMC. Many will read that and think "Of course, that's obvious," but we mean that in a very specific way (many more will read that and then go back to swiping videos on TikTok, so thank you for sticking around...).

For the past few years, there have actually been two companies operating at the leading edge -- TSMC and Samsung. With all the attention that TSMC gets for both commercial and geopolitical reasons, we found that a lot of people sort of forgot about Samsung. A few years ago that would be a mistake, Samsung was always competitive with TSMC, if a little bit slower and harder to work with. But it is looks like that may change.

As usual, Dylan Patel has a good piece on the troubles at Samsung. The quick summary of that piece is that Samsung is facing delays both for its 7nm process and for its DRAM memory products. Read back on some of the press coverage of Samsung over the past year, and it looks a lot like something is really wrong there. Delays. False starts. Mixed messaging. For us, the eeriest part of this is that this is a pattern we have seen many times before. This is what every company looks like just before they fall off the Moore's Law curve.

To be clear, we are not saying that Samsung is going to abandon development of leading edge manufacturing capabilities. They have immense resources and know-how. They have to keep moving forward. But that does not mean they have to structure their business the same way.

More specifically, we have heard a few people argue that Samsung should exit the foundry business, stop manufacturing chips for others and instead focus solely on their highly profitable memory business. We know that there are people within Samsung making this argument, but we have no way to gauge how influential they will ultimately be.

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