TSMC Poised to Begin Manufacture of 28nm Chips

Since manufacturing technologies are always moving to more advanced processes, it was only a matter of time before TSMC finally moved on to a new node, and it seems that the next one will be the 28nm manufacturing technology.

Apparently, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is finally ready to move on to its next process.

This year and the previous one saw TSMC being plagued by certain issues related to its 40nm technology, issues that ended up affecting AMD's and NVIDIA's marketing performances.

The two video card makers were also planning on making their next batch of GPUs on the 32nm process, but the foundry ended up completely scrapping that node.

Now, TSMC is, according to reports, finally over whatever problems it had that affected its 40nm and 32nm plans.

Thus, the time is almost come for when the 28nm process will finally start to be used, the first products based on it set to be FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays).

Said FPGAs will start being made in the fourth quarter and will probably be 28LP, which employs poly gate and silicon oxide nitrate, as well as other previous-generation materials.

TSMC is, technically, already ahead of all other makers of processor or logic, but the company itself is about a quarter late from its own schedule, since 28LP chips should have started in Q3.

“The first node we are going to release for the 28nm will be called the 28LP. This is our poly gate and silicon oxide nitrate version,” Shang-Yi Chiang, senior vice president of R&D at TSMC at TSMC Japan Executive Forum in Yokohama, supposedly stated.

“We will establish production at the end of June this year, about four months from now, and this is for the low power application," Chiang went on to saying.

As one would expect, TSMC did not comment on this rumor in any way.