However the business did not offer a timeframe for the expenditure and has not said much about it.  The move appears to be to be a spoiler on the fact that Samsung gave the first detailed look at its long-awaited 7nm process at the VLSI Symposia in Honolulu this week. That said that Samsung was to be the first to introduce a new form of lithography, known as EUV because it uses extreme ultra-violet light, that has been in development for some 30 years.

TSMC has chosen a different strategy, sacrificing some shrink to get 7nm to market faster using current lithography tools. Its first 7nm process, CLN7FF, is already in volume production and TSMC says it has more than a dozen customers and expects to tapeout more than 50 designs by the end of the year for a variety of chips including mobile application processors, server CPUs, graphics processors, FPGAs, network processors and AI accelerators.

The announcement that it is pushing for 5nm indicates that it wants to keep its developments at the forefront of the news cycle.