14 DAY TRIAL // Last week, at the company's GTC 2012 conference, Nvidia discussed their current low yields and wafer availability problems. The manufacturer reportedly claims that the yields are high, but the wafer availability is low.
This is in direct contradiction with TSMC’s promise to make Nvidia a priority partner when it comes to 28 nm manufacturing.
Nevertheless, at the same time with Nvidia’s GPU conference, a semiconductor conference took place at the Double Tree Hotel in San Jose, California, called Semico Impact Forum.
One of the popular topics of discussion at the Semico forum was the industry’s next year shift towards 20 nm manufacturing.
The move will most likely start during the second half of next year and it will probably be quite expensive, as it is estimated that the costs of the shrink will only be amortized after building and selling at least 100 million 20 nm chips.
AMD, Qualcomm and TI will likely be ok with such a high number, but other, smaller companies will probably enjoy the available 28 nm capacity.
This next step will be rather focused on bulk manufacturing rather than SOI, but 28 nm SOI products are likely to compete with 20 nm ones.
It is mostly a question of who will actually go for SOI at 28 nm or 20 nm. IBM is a likely candidate.
AMD has no SOI plans at 28 nm, but it is probable that they’d look into it again at 20nm or 16nm and 14 nm.