In technology-driven industries, the semiconductor industry has always been at the forefront of global technological change. In 2024, TSMC will officially launch trial production of 2nm process (N2), and the foundry price of each wafer will be as high as 30,000 US dollars (about 216,000 yuan), which has once again attracted widespread attention in the industry. Behind such a high price, it is not only the commercialization of cutting-edge technology, but also the fact that the entire semiconductor industry is about to enter a new stage of development - the "sophisticated process era" marked by extreme technology.
Ⅰ The opening of the 2nm era: TSMC's technology gamble and cost wall
TSMC's investment in 2nm process research and development is unprecedented. According to the company's disclosure, its initial capital expenditure on new 2nm production lines in Baoshan, Hsinchu and Kaohsiung exceeded US$40 billion, and its R&D investment in 2023 alone will be as high as US$5.76 billion, accounting for more than 9% of its annual revenue. IC Insights, an authoritative organization in the industry, pointed out that the total R&D expenditure of the global semiconductor industry in 2023 will be about 147 billion US dollars, and the three giants of TSMC, Intel, and Samsung together account for nearly half of the proportion.
The 2nm process marks the first time that TSMC has introduced a fully surround gate (GAA) transistor architecture, known as nanosheet technology, to replace the long-dominated FinFET transistor. In terms of performance, according to TSMC's official data, N2 can improve performance by 10-15% at the same power consumption compared to N3E, or reduce power consumption by 25-30% with the same performance, and increase transistor density by up to 1.7 times. However, this leap forward has also brought significant manufacturing complexity and cost surges, with more than 2,000 process steps in the entire process flow, requiring far more equipment accuracy, environmental control, and material purity than previous generation nodes.
Wafer quotations of up to $30,000 make N2 the most expensive commercial process available. This not only puts an unprecedented economic threshold for chip design companies, but also has a profound impact on the cost structure of downstream products (especially smartphones, servers, AI accelerators, etc.). It is expected that by 2025, TSMC will further promote the 1.4nm (A14) process node, and its wafer price may exceed $45,000, and the trend of semiconductor "technology inflation" is becoming more and more obvious.
Ⅱ The head manufacturers bet: the "Warring States Era" of chips to accelerate the evolution
The commercialization of TSMC N2 has pushed global chip design companies into a new round of "racing race". Key customers such as AMD, Nvidia, MediaTek, Qualcomm and Apple have all locked in 2nm capacity and plan to enter the mass production cycle in 2025.
AMD, for its part, will build its next-generation EPYC server processors on N2, further reinforcing its encroachment on Intel in the data center market. According to data released by TrendForce in April 2024, Intel still occupies about 70% of the global x86 server CPU market, while AMD has gradually exceeded 25%. If 2nm chips take a significant lead in performance and energy efficiency, this share shift will be accelerated.
In terms of the mobile chip market, MediaTek announced that it will launch the Dimensity 9600 flagship chip based on the N2 process in 2025, and Qualcomm has also simultaneously deployed the next-generation Snapdragon 8 series Elite version. According to Counterpoint data, in Q1 2024, MediaTek and Qualcomm together account for more than 70% of the global smartphone SoC market. 2 nanometers will become a decisive weight in the battle for the high-end market of the two.
Apple, TSMC's largest customer, has confirmed that its iPhone 18 released in 2026 will use the A20 series chips, and the M6 processor on the Mac side will also fully deploy the N2 process. This not only ensures Apple's product competitiveness in the field of high-end consumer electronics, but also provides stable initial order support for TSMC's advanced node production line.
Figure: TSMC 2nm chip customer inventory (picture from the Internet)
Ⅲ Technological dividends and hidden worries coexist: the "sweet burden" of advanced manufacturing processes
The technical dividends brought by the 2nm process are clear. Higher transistor density means more functional integration in the same area, especially in AI inference, image processing, high-performance computing, and other fields.
Taking AI as an example, next-generation AI acceleration chips such as Google's TPU v6, AWS Trainium 2, and Microsoft's Maia 300 are all planned to use the N2 process. McKinsey predicts that the global AI chip market will exceed $100 billion by 2030, accounting for about 15% of the entire semiconductor market. In this context, N2 is expected to become the core supporting technology of the AI hardware stack.
But at the same time, the mass production of advanced processes does not mean that the risk is removed. Judging from the initial production experience of the 3nm node, yield ramp-up is a major challenge. The initial yield of N2 is expected to be less than 60%, which is far from the level of economic production. TSMC is speeding up this process through means such as the "Bridging Yield Improvement Period" and the "Customer Collaborative Verification Program".
In addition, design firms need to develop separate physical design kits (PDKs) for 2nm processes, rewrite physical implementation flows, and perform multiple rounds of timing and voltage verification. The cost of the entire design-verification-tape-out cycle increases by about 30%-50%, which is almost unbearable for small and medium-sized chip design companies.
Ⅳ Symbiosis between multiple paths and the future: advanced manufacturing processes are not the only answer
Although advanced manufacturing represents the most cutting-edge chip manufacturing capabilities, it is not the only path for the future of the entire industry. The future of the semiconductor industry will present a multi-dimensional pattern of "node + architecture + integration + material" quadruple integration.
In terms of architecture innovation, the rise of RISC-V open-source instruction sets has accelerated, and a complete ecosystem from embedded to AI inference has been gradually built, helping small and medium-sized enterprises achieve differentiated breakthroughs at a lower cost.
In the field of materials, the research of carbon nanotubes, graphene, and two-dimensional materials such as MoS₂ is gradually breaking through the performance limits of traditional silicon-based CMOS. Intel, IMEC, Samsung, and other companies have made intensive deployments in advanced packaging and heterogeneous integration to achieve system performance improvements without relying on smaller process nodes.
Modular design concepts such as system-on-chip (SoC) and chiplet are becoming another important way to reduce costs and improve efficiency. AMD's chiplet architecture has proven invaluable in reducing wafer utilization and increasing product flexibility, providing a degree of "technology independence" for other non-TSMC customers.
Conclusion: The new cycle of the semiconductor industry has begun, and strategic choices are better than blind catch-up
The commercialization of TSMC's 2nm process is not only a sign of technological evolution, but also a litmus test for the strategic choice of the entire industry. Standing at the watershed of this process node, leading companies will accelerate the sprint to higher-level processes to seize the performance highland; More design and manufacturing manufacturers may choose to build a survival logic in the "non-N2" era through packaging, architecture, or scenario-specific optimization.
The future semiconductor competition is no longer a race for a single process node, but a systematic game covering manufacturing capacity, design ecology, packaging integration, and supply chain management. At the intersection of "Moore's Law Slowdown" and "Heterogeneous Rise of Systems", how to achieve greater technical value with fewer resources will determine who can stand at the top of the global semiconductor ecosystem in the next decade.
