Samsung has announced that its foundry business has started mass producing 6nm and 7nm chips using the EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) lithography process. The company's new V1 facility, which is also its first dedicated production line for manufacturing chips using the EUV process, broke ground in February of 2018 and started testing wafers production in the second half of 2019.
The South Korean chipset giant has mentioned that its 6nm and 7nm products will be delivered to customers in the first quarter of 2020. Samsung's state-of-the-art V1 production facility, which is located in Hwaseong, Korea, is equipped to go as low as producing 3nm EUV chips in the coming years. The company has completed the product design for 5nm chips and started the process development for 4nm chips.
By the end of this year, Samsung's cumulative investment on the production line will reach $6 billion, and the production capacity will triple when compared to last year. The company's S1, S3, and V1 facilities are capable of producing sub-10nm wafers, which are in high demand these days. The company says that the EUV lithography process is essential for creating complex patterns on wafers, and chips from these wafers will be used in 5G, AI, and automotive chips.
In total, Samsung Foundry has six production lines, one in Austin, USA, two in Giheung, Korea, and three in Hwaseong, Korea. The company makes chips for a lot of big-name brands, including Baidu, Intel, Nvidia, and Qualcomm. It recently bagged orders to mass-produce Qualcomm's X60 5G modem using 5nm technology.
