According to ExtremeTech, with the advent of PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, the demand for AMD CPUs and GPUs has skyrocketed, and TSMC will use TSMC as a chip insulator from around the fall of 2020 for the Ajinomoto Build-up Film (ABF) . It seems that suffering from a shortage has become a bottleneck in supply.
ABF is a high-performance semiconductor insulation material developed by the Ajinomoto Group. In modern CPUs where circuits are built at the nanometer level, it is commonplace to have a multi-layered structure in which multiple circuits are layered, and ABF is used to insulate between the layers. According to Ajinomoto, it is used in almost 100% of the world's major PCs.
This lack of ABF has a great impact not only on AMD but also on many chip makers such as Intel, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Apple and Samsung. Economic news media Digitimes reported in June 2020 that ‘the supply shortage of ABF could worsen in 2021,’ but ExtremeTech said the forecast seemed to be right.