Strong demand on the part of AMD and NVIDIA may leave it no choice

Mar 20, 2012 09:01 GMT  ·  By

TSMC doesn't seem to have much trouble with the 28nm process technology but, going by what a recent rumor has been saying, its manufacturing ability still seems to be sorely tested.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company doesn't have enough 28nm chips to go around, according to Digitimes.

This isn't due to some yield issues, not after all the effort put into avoiding the mess that companies had to deal with when 40nm chips were the rave.

Nevertheless, even though the 28nm process is doing better than expected, the foundry still cannot keep up with demand.

In other words, NVIDIA and Advanced Micro Devices must have placed large volumes of orders with TSMC, larger than it can handle.

Moreover, in addition to these two makers of graphics processing units (GPUs), designers of ARM-based SoCs (system-on-chip devices) have placed orders of their own.

As such, there are high odds that the chip manufacturer will increase its monthly supply capacity this year (2012).

That is to say, it will call upon, or just build from scratch, more production lines for making 28nm graphics processing units, since the 12-inch fabs are already running at full capacity.

An especially pressing concern is that designers are starting to approach UMC (United Microelectronics) and Samsung for 28nm production, which are TSMC's rivals.

On a related note, the 40nm and 65nm nodes are experiencing a high level of interest as well, not just the 28nm one.

The 28nm process accounted for 2% of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company revenue in the fourth quarter of 2011.

That percentage is expected to jump to 5% for the ongoing first quarter of 2012, and then further as time goes by. For the whole year, the foundry foresees that 28nm will hold a 10% proportion, which may not sound like much, but is still a rapid surge, all things considered.