One has to wonder just how many chips companies want if even this isn't enough

Jul 26, 2012 11:29 GMT  ·  By

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, like so many others, has published its financial results for the second quarter of 2012, the one that ended in June.

The company's revenue increased 15.9% on-year, while net income went up 16.3% compared to the same period (April-June, 2011).

What's most important to us, however, is the state of the 28nm manufacturing process, and it does seem like we have good news to impart here as well.

TSMC's 28nm chips, like NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, as well as Qualcomm SoCs, accounted for 7% of the foundry's revenue.

After some financial digging, it was established that, to reach that point, the supply must have risen by around 70%.

"This year, every quarter, the major effort has been to ramp up 28nm and in doing so of course we did incur a lot of costs," said Morris Chang, chief executive officer of TSMC, during a recent conference call with financial analysts.

''As a result, the gross margin of 28nm all year this year will not be up to the corporate average standard. [...] 28nm is progressing very well.''

TSMC's CEO eventually said how many 300mm 28nm wafers the company was expected to make by the end of the year.

"Our output and our yields are both above the plans that we set for ourselves and the plans that we communicated to our customers early in the year. [...] We expect to ramp up to about 68 thousand 300mm wafers per month by the end of the year."

Currently, the 28nm share of 7% is far from the 28% of 40nm (28%) and 65nm (26%). It will be interesting to see how these numbers change this year and in 2013, when 28nm demand will finally be properly satisfied.

"Due to continuing strong demand for our 28nm technology, we expect to double the shipments of 28nm in the third quarter," Chang said. "First quarter of 2013 on, we will fully meet the 28nm demand. It is also then that we expect that the 28nm gross margin will catch up with the corporate average."