TSMC Symposium 2025

On February 23, 2025, TSS attended TSMC Symposium 2025 in Santa Clara, CA. The theme this year is Advancing the AI Future. What smartphones did for mobile SoCs over the past two decades, AI is doing for silicon today — but on a much larger scale. From cloud to edge, AI is hungry for performance, but it’s also power-sensitive. That plays right into TSMC’s long-standing strength in power-efficient manufacturing, honed over years of building chips for battery-powered devices. Seeing Nvidia's Blackwell up close was definitely impressive with over 200 billion transistors!

It is exciting to see TSMC's advanced nodes road and are evolving rapidly, with A14 and A16 pushing nanosheet transistors forward. A14 brings impressive gains in performance, power, and density — even before backside power delivery (SPR), which arrives in A16 in 2026. N2 is already generating an explosive wave of tape-outs, surpassing even the wild success of N3 in its early days.

TSMC also confirmed that N3 is the final and most refined FinFET node, with multiple variants like N3E, N3P, and the new N3C. From here on, it’s all about gate-all-around and advanced packaging — another major theme that was discussed at the conference.

The innovation zone at the symposium always featured many new, interesting and up and coming projects. Cerebras among all the company at the zone displayed their AI chip with 4 trillion transistors (in 5nm technology) was definitely the highlight there.

One of the best things at the Symposium is for TSS to catch up with other friends and old colleagues in the industry. Here shown are our friends at Certus Semiconductor.

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