Semiconductor industries are likely to enjoy increased demands in 2018 through increased demands for chips for mining of virtual currency.
TSMC, which is the world’s biggest semiconductor foundry business, recently proposed that estimated value of its 2018 sales growth to be between 10 and 15% while it was announcing its performance. This value is higher than last year’s growth rate when it was 9%. Reason why it is proposing such high value in spite of weak demands for chips for mobile devices such as Smartphones is due to increased demands for chips for mining cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin.
“Demands for HPC (High Performance Computing) are very strong in order to implement blockchain including chips for mining cryptocurrency and AI (Artificial Intelligence).” said CEO Mark Liu of TSMC.
“It is estimated that Bitmain, which is biggest Chinese cryptocurrency mining business and designs its own chips, is responsible for 3 to 5% of quantity of orders received by TSMC.” said Do Hyeon-woo who work as a researcher foor NH Investment & Securities. “This is the part that shows that growth of relevant markets is very explosive.” 3 to 5% is a value similar to amount of orders received from NVIDIA that makes more than $6.52 billion (7 trillion KRW) in annual sales.
Bitcoin is only issued through mining process. Certain amount of Bitcoin can be obtained when numbers that correspond to particular conditions occur after solving cryptographic algorithms. Cryptographic algorithm for Bitcoin is SHA-256, which is a hash function designated by NSA (National Security Agency). Between 100 to 200 chips for mining are used by single miner and they technically process SHA-256.
Bitmain already designed chips for cryptocurrency mining early on and it has been applying them, which are produced through TSMC’s 16-nano process, to its miners. “Not only TSMC but JCET STATS ChipPAC, which is packing these chips, is also operating its plants on 100% operation rate in order to deal with increased supplies.”
Samsung Electronics also recently made a country with a Russian Bitcoin mining hardware company called Baikal regarding foundry business for chips for mining. (Reference: 1st page of the Electronic Times issued on 12/22/17)
It finished development of these chips and it is going to mass-produce them on full-scale through 14-nano process starting from this month. Baikal is planning to release new Bitcoin miners through chips that are produced from Samsung Electronics’ foundry plants.
Staff Reporter Han, Juyeop | powerusr@etnews.com