5G

At present, only two companies – South Korea’s Samsung and Taiwan’s TSMC – manufacture semiconductors on an industrial scale at the most advanced process nodes. These industry leaders are currently producing in commercial quantities at the 7-nanometre (nm) node, while striving to move to 5 nm, and then, finally, to 3 nm by the mid-2020s. For comparison, the US integrated chip manufacturer Intel is also eager to produce in volume at 7 nm, but the company ran into difficulties in achieving this goal, announcing in July 2020 that production of its next-generation chips would be delayed until 2022.