As the years go by, the technology related to chip manufacturing is evolving by leaps and bounds, unlike what happens with, for example, batteries, whose technology is practically the same as 20 years ago. One of the largest chip manufacturers in the world is TSMC, a Taiwan-based company that has confirmed that 1.6nm chips will begin manufacturing in 2026.
The company has made this announcement at the Open Innovation Platform 2024 that is being held these days in Amsterdam and it only confirms the forecast it showed a few months ago, so, on this occasion, the roadmap does seem to be coming true. , at least at this time, in fact, they have even gotten ahead slightly.
By the end of 2025, TSMC will have the technology necessary to start producing chips 2nm (N2, N2P and N2X) in mass, while the manufacture of 1.6nm (A16) will not arrive until the end of next year, according to Dan Kochpatcharin, head of design infrastructure management at TSMC.
The manufacturing process of 2nm and 1.6nm is very similar and they are based on GAA (gate-all-round) transistors. However, the series N2 uses high performance capacitors SHPMIM to reduce the size of the transistor, while A16 uses BSPDN. BSPDN allows us to offer greater performance and greater consumption and power efficiency, according to Ken Wang, design director of TSMC at the same event.
But, in turn, it adds thermal problems that they are working to solve, hence A16 being delayed until late 2026 or early 2027 in the worst case. For its part, N2P does not have the same problem when using SHPMIM, like N2X.
With Donald Trump in the White House, everything could change for TSMC
Donald Trump announced during the election campaign that he became president of the United States the idea of adding tariffs on imports in order to force companies to manufacture semiconductors to create facilities in the United States. To do so, Biden created a special fund in 2022 with more than $50 billion, which has not achieved the set goal.
As Trump stated on Joe Rogan’s podcast, applying duty chip manufacturers, chip manufacturers would be forced to build factories in the United States to save money. TSMC has stated on several occasions that it is not willing to take the most advanced manufacturing processes outside of Taiwan.
In 2021 alone, 44% of imports from Taiwan They were CPUs and GPUs, a figure that today can be much higher. If the tariff increase finally occurs, both NVIDIA and AMD, TSMC’s main clients, will be forced to assume the cost or pass it on to the end customer, so, as always happens in these cases, we are always the losers. the end users.
There is also the remote possibility that TSMC assumes it in the price, as long as the tariff that Trump wants to apply is not an outrage that is unaffordable either by TSMC or by any other company.
