Samsung and Qualcomm announce partnership for 7nm 5G mobile chips

Samsung was expected to make an announcement related to its 7nm process technology soon and it has done just that today. Samsung and Qualcomm today announced that they will expand their decade-long foundry relationship into the EUV (extreme ultra violet) lithography process technology. Samsung’s 7-nanometer LPP (Low Power Plus) EUV process technology will now be used to manufacture Qualcomm’s 5G mobile chipsets.

Samsung and Qualcomm have long been partners in the foundry business particularly with respect to the 14nm and 10nm process technologies. “We are pleased to continue to expand our foundry relationship with Qualcomm Technologies in 5G technologies using our EUV process technology,” said Charlie Bae, the EVP of Foundry Sales and Marketing Team at Samsung.

Samsung’s 7LPP EUV process technology

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 5G mobile chipsets will be able to offer a smaller chip footprint courtesy of Samsung’s 7LPP EUV process technology. This will provide OEMs with more usable space inside the devices to support slimmer designs and larger batteries. The advanced chip design combined with process improvements are expected to deliver significant battery life improvements.

Samsung’s 7nm process is expected to be superior to similar process technology from rival TSMC. 7LPP EUV is Samsung’s first semiconductor process to use EUV (extreme ultra violet) lithography technology. EUV lithography deployment is anticipated to go beyond the barriers of Moore’s law scaling which will pave the way for single nanometer semiconductor technology generations.

Samsung says that its latest 7LPP EUV technology not only reduces the process complexity considerably with fewer process steps and better yield compared to its 10nm FinFET process, it also brings up to a 40 percent increase in area efficiency with a 10 percent higher performance and up to 35 percent reduced power consumption.

“Using 7nm LPP EUV, our new generation of Snapdragon 5G mobile chipsets will take advantage of the process improvements and advanced chip design to improve the user experience of future devices,” said RK Chunduru, SVP of supply chain and procurement at Qualcomm.