Stefan Mileschin

Forecasting strong demand for its 5 nm and 7 nm class process technologies in the coming years, TSMC has announced that it's increasing its capital expenditure for 2019 by a whopping 36% - 40% over its earlier plans. The lion’s share of the additional money will be spent on the equipment that will be used to make 5 nm chips.

TSMC expected its 2019 CapEx to be between $10 billion and $11 bullion early this year (in line with $10.5 billion in 2018), but increased demand for chips to be made using one of its 7 nm-class nodes (N7, N7P, N7+, N6) and projected demand for 5 nm semiconductors made the foundry change its mind. At its conference call with analysts and investors this week, TSMC said that it had decided to raise its 2019 CapEx by $4 billion to increase production capacities available to its customers. The company now expects its capital expenditure for the full year to be between $14 billion and $15 billion. Furthermore, TSMC upped its CapEx forecast for 2020 and expects it to be similar to the revised CapEx for this year.

According to TSMC, $1.5 billion of the $4 billion will be spent to increase its 7 nm capacity, whereas $2.5 billion will be used to increase 5 nm capacity. The company did not disclose what kind of equipment it intends to buy, but in the light of the fact that its 5 nm technology will heavily use extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL) on up to 14 layers, and the fact that both N7+ and N6 also use EUVL on up to four and five layers respectively, it is safe to say that some of the money will be spent on ASML’s latest Twinscan NXE step-and-scan systems.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15001...ion-capacities