Samsung Foundry continues to have a low yield for its advanced chipset production which could lead to an industry shakeup.
The last time Samsung Foundry was struggling with the manufacturing of SoCs for smartphones was early in 2022 when yields for the 4nm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 application processor (AP) were reported to be a low 35%. This percentage means that out of every 100 chips that can be produced from a silicon wafer, only 35 passed quality control (QC). Even though Samsung Foundry was building the chipset for Qualcomm, it was the latter firm that was paying for the defective chips.
With Samsung Foundry’s poor yield figure, Qualcomm quickly entered into talks to switch to rival foundry TSMC. The Taiwan-based foundry was running its 4nm process node with a 70% yield which was twice what Samsung Foundry was able to achieve. So Qualcomm, not interested in throwing away more money, switched to TSMC to build what was called the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1. And it has stayed with TSMC ever since. TSMC will manufacture the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 AP.
Next year, both TSMC and Samsung are expected to start mass production at the new 2nm node that will use smaller transistors allowing more of them to fit insider a chip.
