Excessive Advanced Process TSMC Plans To Close Some EUV Lithography Machines To Save Power

EUV lithography machine is the core equipment in semiconductor manufacturing. Only ASML can produce it. The price of a single machine is about 1 billion yuan. Before Samsung, TSMC, and other companies were rushing to buy it. However, the semiconductor situation has changed this year. EUV lithography, however, because the machine consumes too much power, TSMC plans to turn it off to save power. Sources from the industry chain, mobile phone chip experts, said that since the utilization rate of advanced process capacity began to decline, and the decline time will continue for a period of time after the evaluation, TSMC plans to shut down some EUV equipment from the end of the year to save a huge amount of EUV equipment. electricity consumption.

It is understood that TSMC currently has about 80 EUV lithography machines, which are mainly used for advanced processes of 7nm, 5nm, and below. In September this year, the 3nm process will be mass-produced, all of which require EUV lithography machines. As the demand for other products declines, chips produced by advanced processes are bound to be affected.

Apple's A16 processor of this year's iPhone 14 Pro series is not in a hurry to use the 3nm process and is still using the 4nm process. In addition, Apple also canceled the first-generation 3nm production chip plan due to 3nm energy efficiency issues.

Compared with the previous DUV lithography machine, the EUV lithography machine needs to use a high-energy laser, and the light will be refracted multiple times, resulting in a great loss. The early efficiency is only 0.02%. Now mass production can reach 2% efficiency, but it also means Most of the electricity is consumed.

The production of the EUV lithography machine requires about 30,000 kWh of electricity a day and consumes about 10 million kWh of electricity a year, which is a full electric tiger.