According to industry sources, the largest contract manufacturer of semiconductors, TSMC began to experience difficulties with timely shipments of silicon products produced using 7nm technology. Due to increased demand and shortages of raw materials, the waiting time for customers to fulfill their 7nm production orders has now tripled to approximately six months. Ultimately, this could affect the business of many manufacturers, including AMD, for which TSMC produces modern processors of the EPYC and Ryzen families, as well as Radeon graphics chips.
The resulting increase in demand for TSMC 7nm products is well explained. An increasing number of TSMC partners are switching to the use of modern lithographic processes, which ultimately leads to dense loading of production lines. The expansion of capacity is associated with quite serious capital investments, and therefore cannot be carried out promptly.
Ultimately, all this led to the formation of queues of customers at the semiconductor forge: according to Digitimes, if previously customers waited on average about two months for their orders to be completed, now the waiting time stretches to six months. This, in turn, requires companies that use TSMC's services to forecast long-term demand and place orders in advance. Mistakes made in planning in this situation can easily turn into serious problems that can affect anyone, including AMD.
To be fair, it should be noted that TSMC is trying to satisfy regular requests from regular customers first, and delays in deliveries primarily affect those customers who require increased supplies or are switching to 7nm technology from other technical processes. Thus, although Ryzen 3000 processors and Navi GPUs are manufactured at TSMC using the “problematic” 7nm process technology, AMD, no matter what, will continue to constantly receive semiconductor products under previously concluded firm contracts.
At the same time, this does not guarantee that AMD will not have problems in the future when it needs to increase production volumes of 7nm chips. And such a situation will arise sooner or later, because the demand for AMD products is increasing, and besides, the company’s immediate plans include the release of a number of new products, for which TSMC’s 7nm FinFET technology should also be used. These include, for example, the release of the third generation Threadripper, new mobile Ryzen and Navy 12/14 graphics chips for upper and entry-level video cards.
In addition, the problem may be further aggravated by the release of the new iPhone 11, the A13 Bionic processor of which is also produced using 7-nm technology at TSMC facilities. AMD has previously had to adjust its order schedule for its 7nm chips so as not to compete for production capacity with Apple. This could happen again, especially in light of the high interest in the iPhone 11, the initial demand for which exceeded initial forecasts.
In addition to AMD chips, products from other manufacturers using TSMC’s 7nm process technology are also at risk. In particular, this technology is used to produce Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 mobile processors, used in many flagship smartphones, Xilinx Versal programmable gate arrays, many Huawei mobile chips, as well as the Mediatek system-on-chip expected in 2020.
Meanwhile, TSMC itself is not interested in inflating the emerging shortage of 7-nm products, because otherwise customers may begin to look towards other contractors, in this case Samsung. Therefore, you can be sure that all possible efforts will be made to timely satisfy customer requests. The Taiwanese company reportedly intends to allocate additional funds for the development of its advanced technologies. Let's hope that the problem of shortages will be quickly resolved.
Source: 3dnews.ru