IT News on October 18th: According to a report by the Seoul Economic Daily today, Samsung Electronics will adopt the manufacturing process of TSMC, the world's largest wafer foundry, to produce the core components of NVIDIA's next-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM) – the base die (base die). Prior to this, in all HBM products supplied by Samsung, both the core dies (core die) that served as storage chips and the base dies that acted as system semiconductors were produced in-house by Samsung. Now, Samsung has decided to meet NVIDIA's technical requirements and adjust its one-stop full-package manufacturing model for HBM.

Industry insiders said on the 18th that NVIDIA has made requests to three NVHBM suppliers – Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix (000660), and Micron – to manufacture base die using TSMC’s 3-nanometer process. NVIDIA also requires that the core die uniformly adopt the sixth-generation DRAM process, codenamed 1c. The NVHBM is developed based on the seventh-generation next-generation HBM standard HBM4E architecture and is a custom high-bandwidth memory product released by NVIDIA in August.

According to reports from IT, NVIDIA has made this requirement because the manufacturing solutions of various HBM suppliers differ, making it difficult to achieve stable and consistent performance based on the same design. Standardization can also reduce the workload involved in conducting product verification for each supplier individually. The Device Solutions Division, which is responsible for Samsung's wafer foundry business ( Device Solutions ), after internal evaluation, has decided to accept NVIDIA's requirements.

The report mentions that for standard HBM products, Samsung will still maintain a one-stop, full-package production strategy. This year, Samsung was the first in the world to mass-produce the sixth generation of HBM4, and currently, the seventh generation of HBM4E is undergoing mass-production verification; both of these products use Samsung's own 4-nanometer manufacturing process for their base chips, while the core chips are produced on the 1C production lines at Samsung's Hwaseong and Pyeongtaek factories.

For custom HBM projects targeting customers such as AMD, Samsung plans to continue using its one-stop full-service production solution. At the same time, Samsung also retains the possibility of researching and developing and producing NVHBM in its own wafer factories. An industry insider stated, "Samsung is verifying whether it is possible to manufacture NVHBM base chips on its own production lines. This is a contingency plan to prevent NVHBM demand from exceeding TSMC's production capacity limits."