TSMC ground breaking ceremony for 5nm fab takes place this week

Later this week, TSMC is expected to break ground for the construction of its 5nm fab in the Southern Taiwan Science Park (STSP). This will be the last ground-breaking ceremony for TSMC chairman Morris Chang (86), he will retire in June of this year.

The foundry is expected to kick off 5nm trial production in Q1 2019. Volume production is currently scheduled for 2020. At the same location, TSMC will also build a future 3nm plant. Production at that facility is expected to come online in 2022:

According to TSMC schedules, the 5nm fab will kick off trial run in the first quarter of 2019 before volume production in 2020. In addition, the company has funneled hundreds of engineers into the R&D of 3nm process, and its 3nm fab is slated to start official run in 2022, expected to cluster more upstream equipment and materials suppliers and downstream packaging and testing players. The 3nm fab is expected to attract aggregate investment funds of around NT$750 billion (US$25.69 billion), including NT$500-600 billion investment from TSMC.

DigiTimes also wrote that Samsung is developing a 4nm node, this process will compete with TSMC's 5nm node. Which of these two will perform better remains to be seen, these days the values before nanometer don't mean a lot anymore.