Top foundries are making incredible strides in their never-ending efforts to increase the speed, functionality, and efficiency of smartphone processors. Just this year, TSMC, the planet's leading foundry, is set to start mass production of 2nm chips. Next year, this Taiwan-based company says it will start mass production of 1.6nm chips. As these process node numbers fall, the size of the transistors inside these devices reduce which allows more transistors to be shoehorned into them.
This is crucial because smaller transistors imply that more can fit into a given region of the device. Transistor density is a statistic that typically increases as the process node decreases.
A chip's transistor count is particularly significant since, generally speaking, the more transistors a chip has, the more potent and energy-efficient these semiconductors are. Think about the remarkable decline in process nodes that has occurred in the past few years.
For instance, the 7nm A13 Bionic application processor (AP), which has 8.5 billion transistors, powered the iPhone 11 series in 2019. The 3nm A18 Pro AP was used in the iPhone 16 Pro Max, which was introduced in September of last year. Although Apple never disclosed the chipset's transistor count, given that the A17 Pro has 19 billion transistors, the component probably contains more than 20 billion transistors.
Fourth Quarter Revenue of $26.88 billion
With fourth-quarter revenue of $26.88 billion, up 37% year over year, TSMC is on a roll. Although first-quarter gross would increase 34.7% on an annual basis, what TSMC refers to as "smartphone seasonality" will cause a sequential fall in the company's top line for Q1 2025.
In order to improve the drive current and eliminate current leakage, TSMC will begin producing its 2nm chips using Gate-All-Around (GAA) transistors, which employ horizontal nanosheets that are stacked vertically to enable the gate to cover all four sides of the channel. Chips that perform better and use less energy are the end result. Backside power delivery (BPD) will be introduced by TSMC when it begins manufacturing 1.6nm processors.
The 2007 introduction of the first iPhone, which employed a processor based on the 90nm manufacturing node, demonstrates how far we've gone. The 3nm A19 and A19 Pro APs, which will be manufactured utilizing TSMC's third-generation 3nm node (N3P), will power the forthcoming iPhone 17 series, which is scheduled for release in September. With the 2026 iPhone 18 series, Apple should be able to release the first iPhone to run on 2nm silicon.
When will the first iPhone with an AP built with the 1.6nm node be released? We'll need to follow up with you on that. According to TSMC, 1.6nm devices will provide an 8% to 10% speed boost at the same power as 2nm node