Apple A-series chip manufacturer TSMC has obtained land upon which it plans to build a 2-nanometer fabrication plant, the company’s senior vice president for operations revealed.
In a report published Tuesday, YP Chin said the next-next gen chip fab facility will be located in Hsinchu, a city in northern Taiwan. While there’s no confirmation on when the 2-nm chips will debut, if past patterns are anything to go by, it’s likely they will debut with the 2024 iPhone.
Earlier this year, TSMC got permission to build a chip factory in Arizona. However, it seems this U.S. factory won’t be used for manufacturing the cutting-edge iPhone chips mentioned in today’s report.
TSMC is Apple’s A-series chipmaker of choice
TSMC has made A-series chips for the iPhone for years. Currently it is hard at work making 5-nanometer chips for Apple’s iPhone 12, scheduled to debut this fall.
The nanometer number on a CPU relates to how many transistors can fit on a chip. The smaller the number of transistors, the more can fit on a chip per square millimeter. The number of transistors indicates how many operations a chip can carry out. That means that the smaller the number of nanometers, the more powerful a phone that uses that chip theoretically is. A chip manufactured with a smaller fabrication process will also benefit from reduced power consumption. This is because the electrons don’t need to travel so far between transistors.
Always looking forward, TSMC announced to shareholders earlier this year that its 2-nm production was kicking off. Based on Apple’s habit of adopting a new nanometer process in its A-series chipset every two years, this would mean 2-nm chips in 2024. TSMC says it remains on track to deliver 3-nm chips in 2022.
Source: Digitimes
