Sources from South Korea claim that Qualcomm's next generation application procesor will be fabricated by Samsung using EUV-based 7nm tech.

Qualcomm, the world’s largest maker of application processors (AP) for smartphones, has once again turned to Samsung to produce its next generation chips, industry sources said on June 7.

According to The Elec, Samsung Foundry will begin mass producing the Snapdragon 865 chips by the end of the year. Production will commence at Samsung’s Hwaseong 17 line using exclusive EUV lines to enable mass production as early as February next year, according to the sources. In order to keep production costs low, Samsung is likely to apply EUV tech to layers 7 through 10.

Qualcomm and Samsung have been collaborating on the production of Snapdragon chips until the 10nm node. However, U.S. chipmaker turned to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company last year for its Snapdragon 855 chips.

Samsung Electronics is No.2 in the global chip foundry market, following TSMC. It was the first in the world to complete EUV-based 7nm mass production process nodes from which it rolled out its first Exynos AP in April last year for the upcoming Galaxy Note 10.

IBM has also signed on for the EUV-based 7nm process. IBM has officially announced that Samsung would be producing its next CPU chips, along with Nvidia for its GPUs.

On the other hand, TSMC has received foundry orders by Apple and Huawei.