The development proposal of a 3nm Fab(a semiconductor production factory) from Taiwan’s TSMC, the world’s #1 company in the foundry industry, had passed the environmental impact assessment on the 19th. The Taiwan Economic Daily stated that “the world semiconductor industry is heading into a new era.”
This day, Taiwanese government officials and the executives of TSMC attended the environmental evaluation meeting and concluded that there will be no problem supplying the water and electricity for 3nm Fab to operate.
TSMC’s 3nm Fab requires 75,000t of water and 880MW of electricity for daily operation. Korea’s Gori #1 Nuclear Power Plant, which was permanently shut down last year, had a capacity of 587MW. Usually, the power capacity of a single nuclear power plant is at around 1,000MW, and newly built plants have a capacity of 1,400MW.
A total of 600 billion Taiwan Dollars (est. 21.96 trillion KRW) will be invested in the construction of TSMC’s 3nm Fab, it is planning a risk production in 2021 and will start mass production in 2022. TSMC’s 5nm Fab(Fab 18), which started its construction this January, is scheduled to start risk production in April of next year and will start mass production in 2020. A total of 500 billion Taiwan Dollars (est. 18.3 trillion KRW) has been invested in the 5nm Fab.
In a recent report released by the Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International(SEMI), it is predicted that the equipment expenditure of global fabs will decline by 7.8% in the following year compared to 2018. However, it was shown that the expenditure of fabs in Taiwan will increase by 24%, contrary to global trends.
Taiwan’s ‘Gongshang Shibao’ wrote an article titled <Fabs around the world are hibernating, but Taiwan’s Fab is still hot>, citing the construction of TSMC’s 5nm Fab. If construction of the 3nm Fab, which passed the environmental impact assessment, starts as planned, it will be included as part of the equipment expenditure in 2021.
