Overview
- TSMC, at its Santa Clara technology symposium on Wednesday, outlined a roadmap that puts A13 (1.3 nm) and A12 (1.2 nm) into volume production in 2029 and adds an N2U 2 nm variant in 2028.
- Executives said they will hold off on ASML’s High‑NA extreme‑ultraviolet scanners through at least 2029, choosing to extract more performance from current EUV tools that cost far less than the newer machines.
- N2U is billed as a modest step on the 2 nm platform with about a 3–4% speed lift or an 8–10% power cut versus N2P, offering a lower‑risk option for AI, high‑performance computing, and mobile chips.
- Packaging will do more of the heavy lifting, with CoWoS scaling to 14× reticle size in 2028 to fit roughly 10 compute dies plus about 20 high‑bandwidth memory stacks, wafer‑scale SoW‑X targeted for 2029, and A14‑to‑A14 SoIC 3D stacking slated for 2029.
- TSMC said its COUPE co‑packaged optics will enter production in 2026 for data centers with about 2× better power efficiency and roughly 90% lower latency than pluggable optics, while markets reacted with TSMC shares up about 5% and ASML closing down about 1.8% on Thursday; Reuters also reported a 2029 packaging plant in Arizona.