TSMC Sees Increased Demand for the 28nm Process Node

Less than a month has passed since TSMC started mass production of chips based on the 28nm process node and sources near the Taiwanese foundry now claim that the demand for this technology continues to heat up, despite a general slowdown in the semiconductor industry.

TSMC is actually expecting its 28nm processes to account for more than 2% of the company’s revenues in the fourth quarter of 2011, according to a DigiTimes report, while in 2012 this figure should rise to over 10%.

The Taiwanese foundry says that this growth will actually be fuelled by the increase in production capacity and customer demand.

Despite the optimistic estimates, it seems like 28nm wafer output will only approximately 20,000 units per month by the end of this year.

However, 2012 will bring a significant change in the number of 28nm wafers produced by TSMC since in the first quarter of the year, TSMC’s 300mm Fab 15 is scheduled to start volume production for chips using the 28nm process.

At this point in time, we don’t know exactly how many wafers will the new Fab manufacture per month, but its monthly designed capacity is set at 100,000 wafers.

TSMC started mass producing 28nm chips at the end of October and the node includes four manufacturing technologies: 28nm High Performance (28HP), 28nm High Performance Low Power (28HPL), 28nm Low Power (28LP), and 28nm High Performance Mobile Computing (28HPM).

Among these 28HP, 28HPL and 28LP are all in volume production while 28HPM will be ready for production by the end of this year.

Right now, outside of AMD and Nvidia who rely on TSMC for their next-generation graphics cores, Altera, Qualcomm and Xilinx have also contracted the foundry to manufacture their 28nm products.

Furthermore, Broadcom, LSI Logic and STMicroelectronics are all reportedly among the potential clients for TSMC's 28nm technology.