According to Taiwan's Economic Daily, industry sources said that TSMC is expected to win a large order for Tesla's Assisted Driving (FSD) chips and produce them in a 4/5nm process. Tesla is expected to become the top seven customers of TSMC next year.

TSMC did not comment on the issue of Tesla's vehicle orders, and Tesla did not respond to reporters' questions yesterday (20). It is reported that when TSMC held the North American Technology Forum earlier, Tesla executives showed up to share successful cases of cooperation with TSMC, and the industry is optimistic about their continued cooperation. If Tesla establishes a large order cooperation with TSMC on the auxiliary driving chip, it will be the first time that a new energy vehicle enterprise customer appears among the main customers of TSMC.

It is reported that Tesla is committed to developing a fully automatic driving assistance system. The related chips integrate high-performance computing, AI and other functions. It needs to adopt advanced manufacturing processes. In terms of capacity, it adopts a multi wafer foundry strategy. Both TSMC and Samsung have placed orders. However, the last generation of Tesla's full-automatic driver assistance chip is mainly manufactured by Samsung, which is also known as Hardware 3.0. It is produced at 14nm and subsequently upgraded to 7nm.

Tesla has previously released a signal that it has set the goal of increasing the annual mass production scale by 50%, mainly relying on the automatic expansion of the super factory and the simplification of the complexity of component design. At the same time, the capacity scale of the wafer foundry partner must also keep up with the company's demand. The industry speculates that as Tesla develops a new generation of new full-automatic driver assistance chips, due to design upgrading and comprehensive consideration of mass production quality and expansion of production scale, it is determined to switch to TSMC's 4/5nm manufacturing process as the main supply, while Samsung will provide part of the production capacity of the previous generation of old chips and storage chips.

According to Tesla's production plan, the industry speculates that Tesla's production scale is expected to start from 3 million vehicles next year, and the two chips of the fully automatic driver assistance chip are designed in the mode of "one main force and one backup". If we place a centralized order for TSMC under a long-term contract and match it with advanced packaging and other designs, Tesla will place an order for TSMC of nearly 15000 pieces and continue to grow rapidly.

The data shows that TSMC's revenue of automotive electronics accounted for about 5% in the third quarter of this year. With the expansion of TSMC's revenue scale, the relevant revenue amount grew by about 15% quarter on quarter, ranking among the top three applications for quarterly growth. According to the Central News Agency of Taiwan media, TSMC has made adequate preparations for the broad automotive chip market. According to TSMC executives, "TSMC has N5A manufacturing processes in logic and N6RF in radio frequency; new storage will be used after 16nm. It is expected that there will be product design decisions next year, and sensors will be promoted to 65nm and 40nm in the future. In addition, TSMC has also invested in the development of separate components and gallium nitride (GaN)."