TSMC Makes 20nm Chips in 2013, Ramps up 28nm

Though some of it has been said before, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) made an announcement about what it plans to do in 2012 and 2013.

As concerns linger about what may or may not happen with TSMC's chip production, the company decided to issue a new press release.

In it, the foundry makes two main statements, each about a different manufacturing process.

For one, TSMC says that its main concern is significantly ramping up the production capacity of 28nm processors.

The process should be complete by the third quarter of next year (2012), at which point its fabs will produce 24,000 wafers a month.

Initially, though, only 50,000 wafers or so will be manageable, which could cause AMD and NVIDIA graphics card production to be strained.

After all, the 28nm process is the one used by both of their next-generation GPUs (graphics processing units).

Even now, there are those who fear that TSMC will have yield problems like it had with the 40nm process.

TSMC is adamant that will not happen, but that doesn't change how, at present, the output is of only 3.5 to 5 thousand.

TSMC didn't actually say what the fabs were supplying, but it did say that 28nm would only account for 1% of its revenue for the fourth quarter of 2011.

Starting from that, some calculations involving individual wafer cost are what led to the 3.5-5,000 figure.

Nonetheless, TSMC has no intention of going through that sort of prolonged episode again and even said that it meant to get its operation to advance quickly enough so that 2013 may herald yet another step forward.
More precisely, the chip maker said it will begin commercial manufacture of 20nm chips in 2013.

Whether or not cards like this AMD Radeon HD 7960 suffer from shortages will reveal whether TSMC has any yield issues or not.