Access to the much awaited 3 nanometers is at hand for Qualcomm and MediaTek. TSMC has traditionally dedicated most of its equipment to the manufacture of Apple products. Nevertheless, starting with 2024, a new improved version of the node (Moving from N3B to N3E) will come through allowing for the entry of others two fabless manufactures.
Initial Challenges and Improvements
The yield rate of machinery in initial phases was about 55%, which did not show much promise. Thus, about half of chips on one wafer would fail the quality test. Few companies across the globe can afford such a huge amount of money to make it worthwhile. On the other hand, Apple and TSMC might have signed a special contract under which TSMC would cover the cost of defective chips while Apple would be charged only for operating ones (usually customers pay for full wafers without regard to working elements inside).
Progress and Production Scale
Improvements have occurred relatively swiftly. The yield rates had been forecasted to increase toward the range of about 70% even earlier, as reported in August. The current capacity of TSMC is up to 60,000 to 70,000 wafers per month. In a nutshell, this number is projected to go beyond 100 thousand in waves by the end of 2024 making the cost per wafer cheaper. The development will enable other chip makers who want to leverage TSMC’s advanced technology.
Future Prospects
This opens up a path toward the manufacturing of a Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 as well as a Dimensity 9400 by the 3 nm process in real life perspective. In summary, N3 project is estimated to record a 10 percent contribution of TSMC in terms of revenue for the coming year, as against 5 percent that was recorded in 2023. Translated, this means that a few chips, such as the A17 Pro for iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max and the M3 series chips in recent Mac laptops could fetch estimated annual revenue of about $3.1 billion in 2023.
