14 DAY TRIAL // Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC for short) makes many sorts of chips. While it dictates the technological level by advancing through processing nodes at its own pace, it follows its clients' guidelines in everything else.
After all, it wouldn't be able to mass-produce all their chips otherwise.
Besides NVIDIA and AMD, who have always contracted it for GPU manufacturing, TSMC has customers the likes of Broadcom, OmniVision and Qualcomm.
Shipments of chips built on TSMC's 28nm low-power high-k metal gates (HPL) process continued to grow in the third quarter, but that's more or less the only positive recent development.
Qualcomm, Broadcom and OmniVision have all slowed down the pace of placing orders, and they have cut back on wafer starts. Negative news regarding high-end smartphone sales and PC market has caused this.
It is not clear yet how this will affect overall finances and how long the cautious attitude will last.