Samsung postpones 3nm mass production until 2022 due to corona crisis

Samsung will not start mass production of chips on 3nm processes until 2022. The company initially planned to start with this at the end of 2021, but the corona crisis makes that difficult. Delivery of equipment is delayed.

Mass production on 3nm is now moving to the following year, although it is not known whether that will happen in early 2022 or later. According to market analyst Digitimes, the reason for the later start date is due to the corona virus. This prevents Samsung from installing the necessary equipment for the production process on time. Samsung has already prepared a 0.1 version of a 3nm process that uses gate-all-around transistors. The consumption of such small chips is much lower and the performance is better, but that process too would not be used until next year.

Samsung is not the only company to use 3nm processes. TSMC does that too. That company already planned to start mass production in 2022. For now, it appears that the company is sticking to that plan. Intel and Global Foundries are also engaged in the same battle to create smaller nodes for chip production as quickly as possible.