Samsung Foundry Roadmap 2022

Recenty, it was the Samsung Foundry Forum (SFF). In fact, there was a pre-event for the press that morning (SFF started after lunch). I couldn't attend in person due to a personal conflict, but the press event was recorded and I received the slides. So here is some of the key information presented.

Business Outlook

Samsung is proud that they were the first semiconductor manufacturer to start volume product in 3nm, with its S3E gate-all-around (GAA) process. Samsung also calls these transistors MBCFETs (the MBC stands for multi-bridge channel).

Samsung Foundry's plan is to triple in size by 2027, with mobile continuing to be the largest segment but HPC/automotive growing 3.5X to become almost as large.

Samsung has three manufacturing sites in Korea including a new fab in Pyeongtaek. There is one fab in Austin, TX. The second fab in Texas is under construction at Taylor (outside Austin) and should come online next year.

Process Roadmap

The diagram above shows a summary of the Samsung Foundry process roadmap for the next five years (click to enlarge). There is continuing development of the FinFET nodes, primarily 5nm and 4nm. At the top in dark blue are the GAA nodes, starting with SF3E today, and going to 2nm in 2025, and 1.4nm in 2027. This seems to me to be a very aggressive schedule, a race to the end of Moore's Law.

A comparison of 5nm to 3nm (SF5E to SF3E) shows that there is a 1.23X increase in performance or a 45% decrease in power. The area at 3nm is 84% of the area at 5nm, a 16% reduction.

Packaging Roadmap

Samsung Foundry's advanced packaging all goes under the "Cube" name, covering interposer-based solutions (I-Cube), hybrid solutions (H-Cube), and vertical die integration either with or without bumps (X-Cube).

SAFE

A couple of decades ago, a foundry could get away with having some foundation IP (standard cells, I/Os, SRAM) and assume that the customers would purchase EDA tools and put together their own flows. That is not at all how it works today. Flows need to be jointly developed with EDA companies like Cadence. Some IP is synthesizable and so doesn't need updating from node to node, but some (especially the PHYs for high-speed SerDes-based protocols like PCIe or Ethernet) need to be developed, test chips need to be manufactured, and the silicon needs to be characterized. This takes a long time and is on the critical path for tapeouts since pretty much every SoC these days involves this IP. In fact, this is also one of the attractions of 3D heterogeneous integration using the various Cube technologies—it is possible to build the "processor" in the most advanced process generation, and then an I/O die in the N-1 or N-2 generation.

Samsung Foundry calls its ecosystem initiative SAFE, for Samsung Advanced Foundry Ecosystem. The SAFE conference actually took place on the following day, with presentations from many of the participants in SAFE, such as Cadence. The presentations were very popular, and there were sometimes more in the audience than seats. Not only were we able to meet face to face for the first time in a couple of years, but shoulder to shoulder, too.

The SAFE ecosystem has 22 EDA partners (including Cadence), 10 OSAT partners, nine DSP partners (that's not digital signal processing, but design services partner), nine cloud partners, and 56 IP partners (including Cadence). There has been very aggressive growth in the IP ecosystem, growing nearly four times since 2017 to today, with over 4000 titles available (I assume the same IP in multiple processes is double counted, but 4000 is still an impressively large number).

Outlook

By 2026, Gartner forecasts that the overall semiconductor market will grow to $783B, with growth accelerating to 9% for the 2020 to 2026 period. Foundry is forecast to grow faster, with a 12% CAGR from 2020 to 2026 to reach $150B. As I said near the start of this post, Samsung plans to triple production between now and 2027...but there is no Y-axis on the graph, so I'm not sure whether we know what the plan ends up with as a revenue number. And, as always, a forecast doesn't always turn out to be accurate. New fabs being built, new processes being developed, changes in end-markets, changes in export regulations...these all have a large element of unpredictability.

Chuck Yeager

Nothing to do with Samsung, but definitely to do with technology, today is 75 years since Chuck Yeager, or more officially Brigadier General Charles Yeager. few faster than the speed of sound in level flight on October 14th 1947. Chuck Yeager was immortalized in Tom Wolfe's wonderful book The Right Stuff about the space program (and the not-so-wonderful movie). All the initial group of astronauts had been test pilots. Chuck was never selected to be an astronaut, perhaps considered too old being born in 1923. Both Armstrong and Aldrin, the first men on the moon, were born in 1930. But according to Wolfe:

Yeager became a personification of the many postwar test pilots and their "right stuff".

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