Samsung Foundry to manufacture ASIC cryptocurrency miners, looks to produce 4nm chips by 2020

Samsung Foundry is looking to expand into the Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) manufacturing business. The South Korean giant is looking to make its semiconductor business even more lucrative, especially, now that it has toppled Intel to become the world's largest chip seller.

At the company's Q4 earnings call, Lee Sang-hyun, VP Foundry Marketing, said, "Recently, the number of semiconductor consignment production orders by digital currency related semiconductor companies is rising. We expect to take second place in the foundry market this year after Taiwan’s TSMC”. A company spokesperson confirmed that Samsung Foundry will soon start making hardware for crytocurrency mining. However, he did not mention any details except for the fact that the company is looking to supply hardware to a virtual mining company based in China.

The company expects to take second place in the foundry business this year after Taiwan's TSMC. It hopes to complete the 7nm fabrication process by end of 2018 and will look towards 5nm and 6nm next year. By 2020, the company aims to complete the 4nm process in line with TSMC's plans.

Samsung foraying to ASICs manufacture can give some competition to established players such as Bitmain and Canaan Creative, both of which are TSMC partners. It will also, hopefully, bring the inflated prices and scarce availability of GPUs under control as ASICs consume less power for similar hash rates compared to GPUs.

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