Next year’s Exynos 2600 is rumored to be built using the 2nm node that Samsung Foundry is mass producing later this year. But test yields at this node are also poor (30%) even though there has been talk of an overall improvement in the foundry’s yields. A distant second in market share to TSMC, Samsung Foundry currently has 8.2% of the contract foundry industry compared to 67.1% for TSMC according to Korea Economic Daily.
Typically, the more transistors that fit inside a chip, the more powerful and energy-efficient a chip is. Reducing the process node means that smaller transistors are used and that increases the transistor count and the transistor density. The latter tracks the number of transistors found in a certain area of a chip. For example, the A13 Bionic chip that powered the iPhone 11 Pro Max was made using TSMC’s 7nm+ process node and carried 8.5 billion transistors.
Samsung Foundry is still facing issues with its production yields on advanced nodes. | Image credit-Samsung Foundry
