This Monday, July 25, Korean electronics giant Samsung began delivering its first 3nm GAA ring-gate transistor process chips to customers as promised. At the same time, the company held a special celebration to mark this milestone. As seen in the press release on the official website, the ceremony was held at the Hwaseong campus in Gyeonggi Province. In addition to company executives, a number of politicians were invited to attend.
(From: Samsung Newsroom)
The official press release reads: “On July 25, Samsung Electronics held a shipment ceremony for its chip foundry products based on next-generation 3nm ring gate transistor (GAA) technology at Line V1 (EVU extreme ultraviolet lithography only) in Hwaseong Park, Gyeonggi Province.
Kyeong-Hyeon Kye (from left), President of Samsung Electronics DS Division, Changyang Lee, Minister of Trade, Industry and Energy of Korea, and Si-young Choi, CEO of Samsung Electronics Foundry Division at shopping mode, encourage the approximately 100 executives and employees involved in the development and mass production of 3nm GAA who participated in this event.
There are also chief executive officers (CEOs) of Daeduk Electronics (Kim Young-Jae), Dongjin Semichem (Lee Jun-Hyeok), Soulbrain (Jung Hyun-Seok), Won Semicon (Kim Chang-Hyun), Wonik IPS (Lee Hyun-Duk), PSK (Lee Kyung-il), Telechips CEO (Jang-Gyu Lee), and other chief executive officers (CEOs) of companies, as well as the presence of KC Tech Vice President (Ko Sang-Geol).
While Samsung is also committed to mass-producing 3nm GAA chips for smartphone manufacturers, industry giants such as Qualcomm are not among its first customers. Instead, the initial supply will go to the cryptocurrency mining industry, mainly because the new process offers significant energy efficiency improvements.
WCCFTech expects that Samsung is still on track to launch a production Exynos 2300 chip based on the 3nm GAA process, but the upcoming Galaxy S23 may still be a “two-step” process.
In other words, Samsung may be considering offering a derivative version based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC at the same time — but only if rival TSMC falls short in 3nm volume production.
Samsung is said to have prepared prototypes for the San Diego-based chipset maker to entice Qualcomm to choose its own foundry for its next-generation flagship SoCs.
Meanwhile, its biggest rival TSMC will also be mass-producing 3nm chips later in 2022 — with the first M2 Pro / M2 Max custom chipsets expected to be used in Apple’s new MacBook Pro and other hardware lines.
Finally, a review of the advantages of Samsung’s 3nm GAA process — officially claiming 45% lower power consumption, 23% higher performance, and 16% smaller chip area compared to the 5nm solution.
If all goes well, the second-generation process could also reduce power consumption by up to 50 percent, boost performance by 30 percent, and reduce chip area by 35 percent.
