Although TSMC’s Fab 21 phase 1 near Phoenix, Arizona, is officially set to start mass production of chips sometime in 2025, the facility is already making processors for the foundry’s biggest client, Apple, according to a report by Tim Culpan. This is not surprising, as the contract chipmaker needs to tune its tools on a known system-on-chip to ensure they work as intended.
According to the report, the Apple A16 Bionic application processor is currently made in ‘small, but significant, numbers’ using TSMC’s N4P (4nm-class) process technology at Fab 21 phase 1 stage 1. Using a completed production line to tune equipment on an SoC that has been in production since mid-2022 and is now made in Taiwan with excellent yields makes a lot of sense. Meanwhile, earlier this month, we reported that yields at TSMC’s Fab 21 matched yields at TSMC’s Taiwanese fabs. That report somewhat corroborates the current report about small-scale production of Apple A16 Bionic at Fab 21.
Apple’s A16 Bionic is a fairly complex SoC consisting of 16 billion transistors and packing six general-purpose cores (two high-performance Everest cores and four Sawtooth energy-efficient cores), a five-cluster GPU, a 16 TOPS NPU, and 44 MB of cache in total. The processor has a die size of around 113 mm2 and uses different libraries, so it is hard enough to make—just what TSMC needs to tune equipment at its new fab.
Apple introduced its A16 Bionic processor in September 2022, along with its iPhone 14 Pro. Nowadays, this SoC is used for the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus, as the iPhone 14 Pro has been discontinued.
The volumes that TSMC produces A16 Bionic are small, so it is unclear whether Apple actually uses them to build smartphones assembled in China and India or stockpiles them to make different products. The company is known for using its smartphone processors in other products, such as tablets, set-top boxes, and even displays, so it will not be surprising if the Apple A16, made in the U.S., will be used for some of these devices.
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