Leading chip contractor TSMC announced on Thursday that its development of 3nm technology has gone as expected and will enter the mass production phase sometime later in the fourth quarter of this year. TSMC stated in August that it planned to realize mass production of 3nm chips in the second half of 2022. TSMC’s rival Samsung achieved this phase in late June. Apple, a major client of TSMC, will skip this tech node to use an enhanced 3nm foundry node – N3E – for chips in iPhones and Macs in 2023, Nikkei Asia reported in September. [UDN, in Chinese]