Samsung reportedly has Apple’s blessing to manufacture the processors for the Apple Watch, which will be allegedly be made using the company’s 28nm process technology.
The order would come at just the right time for Samsung, which recently announced another quarter of poor earnings: giving it its first annual profit decline since 2011.
With Samsung’s mobile division in the toilet, the company needs to focus on other areas, like securing orders for chip fabrication.
Apple is said to have ordered between 3,000-4,000 12-inch wafers monthly, according to industry sources.
If that sounds far too few for a mass-market device like the Apple Watch, remember that this would not be the total number of chips, but rather the larger silicon round ingots which are then sliced into individual wafers, each only 1mm thick.
The number of Apple Watches that will be in the initial run is still unknown, although Gene Munster has suggested it could be around the 10 million unit mark in 2015. (The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus sold that many in its first weekend.) Other reports have put the number considerably higher, around the 30-40 million unit mark.
While it seems that Samsung could have won the Apple Watch chip order race early on, today’s report suggests that competition is already heating up between different companies hoping to woo Apple with their 1Xnm FinFET process technologies for orders related to the second-generation Apple Watch — presumably arriving in 2016.
As with the A9 chip orders for the next-generation iPhone, the two companies competing most fiercely for these orders are said to be Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).
Source: Digitimes
