Samsung has held its position as the market leader in this market thanks to its new 14nm FinFET production method that also helped the South Korean giant to develop the Exynos 7420 which has been used in the Galaxy S6.
Moreover this production process has also allowed Samsung to steal big customers such as Apple and Qualcomm from the Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
Now in a bid to counter this move TSMC has planned to skip the 14nm process and head straight to the 10nm juts like Samsung which had skipped the 20nm process and had went straight to the 14nm.
The Taiwanese company is now expected to start risk trial production of the 10nm chips within this year and this would enable it to accept orders from the major consumers such as Apple and Qualcomm by early next year.
This will actually be a huge blow to Samsung as the company is already producing the Snapdragon 820 for Qualcomm and Apple’s A9 chip and it doesn’t want these huge customers to go back to TSMC.
According to the inside sources the South Korean giant has been planning to expand its 14nm capacity and hasn’t publicly announced the setup of its 10nm production lines which it has previously stated to start by the end of next year.
Now the company’s System LSE division has showed its first 10nm wafers in a rather unusual move which was basically a message to its major customers that the company is more than capable of producing these 10nm chips.
These 10nm chips are basically said to provide a 20 percent increase in clock rates and a huge 40 percent decrease in power consumption.