For just a month ago started TSMC begin mass production of 28nm, and despite the unstable market environment continues orders to TSMC to lie down on high. TSMC has never seen such a high demand for a new manufacturing process and suffers from capacity problems.
TSMC is currently the only one who can ship the chips on 28nm to customers, and it's been a record number of people who stood in line to the new technology. In normal circumstances, it was AMD (ATI) and NVIDIA has been on the capacity of a new manufacturing techniques, along with few smaller companies. Among the clients who want the technology we have Altera, AMD, NVIDIA, Qualcomm and Xilinx, while Broadcom, LSI Logic and Texas Instruments are potential customers.
But according to earlier data from May so there would be 89 different circuit designs for the new manufacturing technology, a figure that exceeded the total number of designs at 40nm and we can only assume that the figure is even higher today. TSMC will also have to increase the price of the new technology because of the high demand. 28nm technology will, on this account for 2 percent of its total revenues in 2011, unlike the 1 percent previously predicted.
From the time an order entered in TSMC will take a full six months before they get their wafers delivered, this can be compared to that it often takes about two months to produce a wafer. The company currently has capacity to produce 20,000 wafers per month, but during the first quarter of next year, opens the new Fab 15th It will be the company's third plant producing 12-inch wafers and it is then expected to have a capacity of 100,000 wafers a month.
This also confirms reports that the availability of 28nm is low or nonexistent before year end. It is rumored that AMD will launch a new series of mobile graphics cards around December 9 , but it has also previously talked about it just be an announcement of things to come. In any case, it sounds like good times for TSMC and semiconductor industry, although the world economy in general do not seem to stabilize for a while yet.
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