TSMC Won A Large Order For Apple's Server Chips

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TSMC Won a Large Order for Apple's Server Chips

TSMC advanced packaging received orders and sent good news again, following Nvidia, Supermicro (AMD) and other large customers rushing for CoWoS production capacity, after the orders were full, SoIC, which also belongs to TSMC's advanced packaging platform, was adopted by Apple for the first time, and will be used for M series chips and next-generation AI server chips, with 2nm process production, and is expected to be large-scale in 2025.

TSMC has never commented on a single customer message. The legal person is optimistic that with Apple's introduction of TSMC SoIC, it will not only make the cooperation between the two sides closer, but also allow TSMC to continue to receive orders and hot operations through advanced packaging and advanced process integration.

Encouraged by relevant news, TSMC closed at the highest price of 979 yuan yesterday (3), up 19 yuan, or 1.98%, and is poised to challenge the record high price of 984 yuan. ADR rose more than 2% in early trading on Wednesday.

TSMC has summarized that advanced packaging belongs to the 3D Fabric system integration platform, which includes three parts: the SoIC series of 3D silicon stacking technology, and the CoWoS family and InFo family of advanced packaging in the later end. Among them, the SoIC series is a one-stop production in TSMC power plants, which is relatively bottleneck-free and front-end packaging, and will be put into production in small quantities in 2022, and the company plans to expand its production capacity by more than 20 times in 2026 to meet the growth of customer demand.

In the past, Apple was the largest customer of TSMC's InFo family, mainly for the A-series processors of the iPhone. The industry believes that Apple's use of TSMC's advanced packaging and subsequent complete services will not only be limited to InFo, but also its own M-series chips can be integrated with SoIC series services.

According to TSMC's official website, advanced packaging can increase the number of computing cores to improve computing power, and can assist in cloud computing, big data analysis, AI neural network training, artificial intelligence reasoning, and high-end smart phones may even be a new demand in the field of autonomous vehicles. According to industry research, Apple's introduction of SoIC-related technology is to expand the transistor content and computing performance through multiple advanced packaging modes, so that the chip performance is more powerful.

At present, the largest customer of TSMC's advanced packaging platform SoIC service is AMD, and foreign Morgan Stanley (Morgan Stanley) has also observed a related trend in response to Apple's introduction of SoIC.

Zhan Jiahong, an analyst at Damo Semiconductor Industry, pointed out that Apple is likely to use TSMC's 2nm process and SoIC-X technology in the second half of next year to produce the next generation of AI server chips (possibly M5, including M5 Pro/Max/Ultra), and the new design may manufacture the central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) separately and package it on the same chip, using I/O chip interconnection, so it is estimated that TSMC will significantly expand SoIC production capacity from next year.

Zhan said Supermicro has been using TSMC's SoIC-X technology for many years, including the MI300 series of AI GPUs and high-end gaming CPUs. SoIC-X yields were initially 50 percent, but recent supply chain surveys show that SoIC-X yields for Supermicro products are now 90 percent or higher.

According to the information of the Supermicro and TSMC Technology Forum, the Supermicro MI300 series not only adopts TSMC's 5nm family process, but also integrates various technologies through TSMC's 3D Fabric platform, such as stacking the 5nm graphics processor and CPU with SoIC-X technology on the underlying chip, and then integrating it in the CoWoS package to achieve exascale high-speed computing innovation.