Earlier this week, Samsung announced its quarterly revenue for the third quarter (July – August) of 2023. During the announcement, the company said it is on track to keep its second-generation 3nm and fourth-generation 4nm semiconductor chip fabrication processes ready for mass production by the second half of 2024.
Samsung's improved 3nm and 4nm processes will likely be used to fabricate high-end chips
While this year was pretty bad for Samsung in terms of chip revenue, the company expects next year to be much better as the demand for semiconductor chips is expected to rebound starting next year. And Samsung's more advanced chip manufacturing process nodes—SF3 and SF4X—will be ready just in time. SF3 is Samsung Foundry's second-generation 3nm chip fabrication process and is said to be a huge improvement over SF3E (first-generation 3nm process) as it offers more flexibility in choosing different channel widths for GAA (Gate All Around) transistors within the same cell type.
Samsung's first-generation 3nm process was launched toward the end of last year and was only used to make relatively less complex cryptocurrency mining chips. While the company didn't compare SF3's performance with SF3E, it did say that SF3 offers 34% lower power consumption and 21% reduction in area than SF4 at the same frequency and transistor count. Alternatively, it can offer 22% faster performance at the same power and complexity.
The South Korean firm's fourth-generation 4nm chip fabrication process, SF4X, is designed to suit high-performance computing applications, such as CPUs and GPUs in data centers. Apparently, this is the first process from Samsung Foundry in years that has been developed with high-performance computing in mind. SF4X offers 10% better performance and uses 23% lower power compared to SF4, its second-generation 4nm process.
This story continues after our video that showcases Samsung's Flex Display panels showcased at MWC 2023.
Samsung's newer 3nm and 4nm chip fabrication nodes could be used by AMD and Exynos
It is rumored that AMD will use Samsung's SF4X process node for some of its chips. However, nothing can be said for sure yet until things go official. AMD CEO Lisa Su mentioned in the past that it is familiar with TSMC's processes, and the company would like to stick with the Taiwanese foundry for the near future. The SF3 process is expected to be used by Samsung's System LSI arm to fabricate the Exynos 2500 (tentative name) chipset for the Galaxy S25 series.
