Samsung gears up its 5nm chip production for 5G smartphones

Many of us may not know, but Samsung, one of the world leaders in the smartphone industry, is also an authoritative semiconductor company, fabricating chips. Now, it is ambitiously pursuing the success of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) on the chip engineering arena. Since 2017, the company is second to TSMC in this segment of the tech industry, however, now it is striving to become the market leader by the year 2030.

SamMobile reports that Samsung is constructing new 5nm EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) production lines in its Hwaseong factory. It’s been one year since the 5nm process for building chips has been available. It is a chip manufacturing technology that facilitates smaller and more power efficient chips to be made for smartphones, especially for 5G-capable ones.

However, the new foundry line Samsung is preparing for the 5nm process may need several months until it’s fully functional - a period of testing, evaluation and improvement of the achieved results is required before it can start mass production. It is estimated that the production line will be ready by the summer of 2020.

Samsung has already received orders from Qualcomm for the 5nm production of its Snapdragon X60 5G modem and hopes to receive more orders in the upcoming years. Additionally, the company is also working on a 3nm process which should be set up in a foundry line by 2021.