Samsung Foundry has won the contract to produce and manufacture Qualcomm's 5nm 5G X60 Modem. This marked as a win for Samsung against its competitor Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
Based on the articles and sources of Reuters, Samsung would produce "at least some" of Qualcomm's X60 5G modem, this move would be similar to how Nvidia is going to source some 7nm GPU production to Samsung's way.
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What is the 5nm 5G X60 Modem
Qualcomm unveiled its 5nM X60 5G modem, which will be featured in phones in 2021, which will also have Apple's iPhone support as well. Qualcomm announced its 5nm X60 5G modem on last Tuesday. It will be featured in phones in 2021, including Apple's iPhones. These modem chips will connect devices such as your mobile phones to 5G wireless data networks, which are going to blow up sooner rather than later. This will also make the chips smaller and more power-efficient compared to previous generations.
When to expect them to arrive
Samsung and TSMC plan to start 5nm production this year, 2020. TSMC right now is the leading contract chip manufacturer, has about 53 percent market share for the fourth quarter of 2019 alone, Samsung on the other hand, has about only 17.8 percent, this is from the data acquired from TrendForce. Samsung has announced on the previous year that they will conduct significant changes in the R&D in the coming decade. It is safe to say that this is one of those moves to garner more market share in the coming decade.
TSMC moves slightly faster
As TSMC has the whale of the share of the orders, it was quick to grab Apple Inc for their set of iPhones later on 2021. In addition to this, they will be ramping up and showing test models in the first quarter of this year. TSMC also stated last month that they expect that the chip will make up around 10 percent of the company revenue for 2020.
Why the change for Samsung right now
Shawn Han, the senior vice president at Samsung Foundry, stated that they would be "diversifying customer applications" this year. One of the moves Samsung has in store for sure to compete in the market against the behemoth TSMC.
Samsung is best known for its phones and other household devices, unbeknownst to all; however, Samsung is the world's second-biggest chip manufacturer with the credit going to its foundry division. They self-supply many of their mobile phone parts as well as the chips for outside customers like International Business Machine Corp(IBM) and Nvidia Corp, to state a few.
Samsung has also planned to invest $116 billion in non-memory chips until 2030 to remove themselves from their reliance on semiconductor revenue, which is very volatile.
As Samsung prepares to compete in the chip-manufacturing business, what else can we expect from the company as they plan to diversify their portfolio more in the coming decade? Only time will tell, and you as consumers should be excited about that change.
