China's first 4-nm chip
Advanced packaging technology has gained attention due to the current development of advanced processes reaching a bottleneck. Both TSMC and Samsung announced the mass production of 3-nmprocesses last year. However, Samsung's 3-nm process has been criticized for its extremely low yield rate, estimated to be around 10% to 20%. The abysmally low yield rate leads to high costs, and it is still unknown which customers are using Samsung's 3-nm process.
TSMC also announced the mass production of its 3-nm process at the end of last year, but it is expected that only Apple will be using this process. Apple is projected to start adopting this process for the production of their A17 processors in June. In the past, whenever TSMC began mass production of advanced processes, Apple and other clients immediately adopted them. However, this time, the 3-nm process has been delayed by six months. Industry experts believe that Apple was dissatisfied with the limited performance improvement and high cost of TSMC's 3-nm process, which compelled TSMC to refine it to the second generation 3-nm process, known as N3E, before Apple agreed to use it.
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