A manufacturing node under 50% performance means that of each wafer of chips that leaves the factory, less than half of them are functional and the rest must be discarded. This level of manufacturing performance is negligible and means that Samsung is currently making losses, as it invests more in this manufacturing than it earns from it and can mean in turn that the price of the first chips at 5 nm is fired with the aim that they can alleviate these problems.
What about Samsung’s 5nm chips?
Manufacturing semiconductors is not an easy task. All the companies in this business know it, and the difficulties in the manufacture of silicon have been felt even by the best in the industry such as Intel or Samsung and today, in the latest report from Business Korea, it has been announced that Samsung is once again have trouble at your 5nm fabrication node.
It was previously reported that Samsung was struggling with the performance of its 5nm node, and yet until now we did not know the extent of these problems that, according to sources from Business Korea, the node is currently under 50% performance. . That means that, for example, out of every 100 chips manufactured on a single silicon wafer only half are functional and can be used, and as you will understand that is not a good thing either for Samsung or for the industry in general that expects these chips as May water.
Typically, for a node to go into high volume manufacturing (HVM), the throughput rate should be around 95%, and if it is not at that level the manufacturing at that node is not considered neither efficient nor very profitable. Hwaseong’s V1 line, where these chips are made, uses EUV tools and while the performances are still very poor, it is expected as Samsung engineers tweak and fine-tune the node and the tools they use for it.
It is quite likely that, given the situation and the draft of this manufacturer, in the coming weeks we will be able to follow an evolution quite closely and they will inform us in the coming months of the improvements (or not) that they manage to obtain in said manufacturing node. In any case, the good part is that if a manufacturer has the potential to get out of this well, it is Samsung in both financial and human resources.
