Park Byung-jae, a senior researcher at the foundry department of Samsung Electronics Foundry, delivered a speech at the “2022 Semiconductor EUV Global Ecosystem Conference” this Thursday.
He said that by 2026, the global 3nm process node foundry market will reach US$24.2 billion, an increase of more than 20 times from this year’s US$1.2 billion.
At present, Samsung Electronics is the only company that has announced the successful mass production of 3nm chips. As major semiconductor manufacturers such as Samsung Electronics, TSMC, and Intel begin to introduce EUV equipment and process technology continues to develop, it is expected that the 3nm process will become a key competitive node.
According to Gartner data, as of the end of this year, the 5nm and 7nm processes accounted for the largest share in the foundry market, with a market size of 36.9 billion US dollars, and their share will be gradually replaced by 3nm in the future. “With the launch of the 14nm FinFET process, Samsung Electronics has risen to No. 2 in the foundry market,” he said.
It is said that the 3nm node requires a new device structure to improve performance. Samsung, which is the first to achieve mass production of the 3nm process, uses MBCFET technology with a gate-around (GAA) transistor structure, which has significantly improved performance and power consumption compared with FinFET.
“In the case of FinFETs, performance increases with pin count, but power dissipation increases more than performance,” he said. “MBCFETs, on the other hand, are much more efficient because they operate on similar improved performance and power at the same level.”
Specifically, in FinFET technology, the performance is increased by 1.3 times, but the power consumption will also be increased by 2.2 times. In MBCFET, when the performance is increased by 1.7 times, the power consumption will only increase by 1.6 times, which is relatively more efficient.
