14 DAY TRIAL // Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturing company TSMC is reportedly
trying to impress Apple with their new technologies in a bid to convince the Cupertino-based gadget maker to move its CPU orders away from Samsung.
Currently, Samsung’s foundry is busy churning out Apple’s CPUs and Samsung’s own Exynos ARM CPU line. Apple's current-generation A5X chip is built on the 40 nm process, by Samsung. They’re already working with 14 nm lithography and have strong technological expectations.
TSMC is not in the same rosy position like Samsung is. The Taiwanese foundry is now able to meet less than 70 percent of orders placed by Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD, TI, and Broadcom, for 28 nm chip manufacturing. Qualcomm doesn’t think that TSMC will be able to meet its demands and thinks about moving some production over to GlobalFoundries.
Nvidia and AMD are also facing shortages and, over all TSMC’s 28 nm facilities represent only 5 percent of its total output.
Therefore, TSMC is planning an early investment into its 20 nm manufacturing process and hopes this will ensure it has a new process ready well in advance (one year ahead of its 2013 target), so it could seek and secure orders in advance, and attain high volume capacity by 2013.
Industry insiders say TSMC has a good chance of landing orders for CPUs by Apple, in 2014.
TSMC has revealed plans to invest about 700 million dollars in building a 20nm R&D line already in 2012. This comes as a surprise as the investment is quite big and it comes a whole year ahead of its planned 2013 roll-out.