TSMC Changes Expansion Budget

After more than a year of troubles related to the 40nm manufacturing process technology, and with AMD and NVIDIA predictably dissatisfied, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company has decided to take more serious measures meant to resolve this issue once and for all. Recently, around the same time when its announced plans to build an extra fab in Taiwan, TSMC also made its capital spending plan public. Said plan seems to have suffered some adjustments.

At first, the foundry intended to spend a total of $1.65 billion to build a new chip plant, expand an existing facility and upgrade its 8-inch fab. These plans have remained, more or less, unchanged, with the exception of the funds allocated for the last of these three projects. To be more specific, TSMC has decided that it only needs $321 million for its 8-inch fab upgrade, instead of the $385 initially planned.

The total of $1.65 billion has, thus, fallen to $1.58 billion. Out of these, about $210 million will be invested into the construction of the new plant. This means that all of the remaining $1.05 billion will be used to expand the 12-inch facility.

“Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has made a slight change to its recently-announced US$1.65 billion capital spending program. The foundry corrected the figure for expansion and upgrade of its 8-inch wafer fab capacity to US$321 million, from US$385 million that was originally disclosed,” Digitimes states.

“Combining a budget of US$1.05 billion for 12-inch facility expansion and another US$210 million for construction of a new chip plant, TSMC is expected to allocate a total of around US$1.58 billion to expand capacity in 2010,” the report concluded.

As far as the extra 300mm fab is concerned, TSMC will start construction efforts around the middle of the ongoing year. When completed, the factory is expected to make about 100,000 wafers a month.