Three nanometres in volume production
On 29 December 2022 TSMC held a ceremony at Fab 18 for the start of volume production on N3 and said the process had entered volume production "with good yields". Against N5: up to 1.6 times the logic density and 30 to 35 per cent less power at the same speed.
Why it matters
The leading node stays in one pair of hands and on one site. The atlas holds the accelerator generations that will be made on this node and its descendants; here it can be seen that the geography of that manufacturing does not change, and that the capital the next step needs is measured in trillions of Taiwan dollars.
The figures come from the press release, filed with the SEC the same day on Form 6-K over the signature of CFO Wendell Huang: up to 1.6 times the logic density and 30 to 35 per cent less power at equivalent speed against N5; total investment in Fab 18 to exceed NT$1.86 trillion; eight phases of 58,000 square metres of cleanroom each, roughly double a standard logic fab; more than 23,500 construction jobs and over 11,300 high-tech ones. TSMC estimates that end products on N3 will carry a market value of US$1.5 trillion within five years of volume production. Chairman Mark Liu presided. Two corrections to the numbers this record arrived with. The research report gave the density gain as 60-70 per cent and the power reduction as 25-30 per cent; the press release says "up to 1.6X" and "30-35%". The first pair is the forecast TSMC gave at its 2020 symposium, not what the cited document says. And the conversion of NT$1.86 trillion into "over 60 billion US dollars" is not in the document - it is a calculation, not a quotation, so it is not here either.