Qualcomm launched the Snapdragon 865, 765 and 765G mobile platforms at the Snapdragon Technology Summit on Tuesday. The high-end Snapdragon 865 will be manufactured by TSMC. But the other two Snapdragon platforms are Samsung foundries. So why did Qualcomm choose two separate factories for foundry?
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On the second day, during the Q & A session, Qualcomm answered the above questions. Qualcomm said that when they select a foundry for each chip, they will consider a variety of factors. These factors include some technical parameters, such as chip power consumption, package size, etc. Besides the technical parameters some commercial considerations are also important, such as wafers Availability, speed of production, and supply chain diversity. For the Snapdragon 865 and the Snapdragon 765, the planned shipments of both chips are very large. In terms of technical parameters, TSMC and Samsung have similar performance. Therefore, the final decision is more based on commercial considerations to ensure diversity in supply. These two manufacturers are the world’s leading foundry manufacturers. This time Qualcomm used both TSMC’s most advanced mass production process technology and Samsung’s most advanced mass production process.
In addition, when answering why the Snapdragon 865 uses TSMC’s 7-nanometer process technology and did not choose TSMC’s 7-nanometer EUV technology, Qualcomm said:
“We used its N7P (TSMC’s second-generation 7nm FinFET) process. EUV is a manufacturing-oriented technology that allows production manufacturers to avoid Double / Triple / Quadruple Patterning. This saves a lot of wafer production time. But the technology does not have much material impact on the end-user experience. What is important to users is power consumption, performance, and area size. The production capacity of the foundry or reducing the number of layers of the chip mask is not the user’s concern. We work with TSMC using the most advanced process technology that can support large-scale supply. Over time, it will gradually migrate to the EUV process. This technology is a production technology and will not provide a better user experience due to the reduction in the size of the transistor. So now most other manufacturers still use the N7P process instead of the EUV process. “