TSMC to Ramp New 28nm Fab Ahead of Schedule

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) seems to be making great progress in preparing for the high volume production of 28nm silicon as the company is expecting to ramp up its new Fab 15 facility ahead of schedule.

The new fab is placed in central Taiwan and, once ready, it will be manufacturing 28nm chips on 300mm wafers.

According to Jason Chen, senior VP of worldwide sales and marketing for TSMC, the company has already started moving in equipment into Fab 15 and high volume production is expected to begin in the fourth quarter of 2011.

The first pilot runs are scheduled for Q3 of this year and will use only the phase 1 facility of Fab 15.

Previously, TSMC has said that it would begin moving equipment into the factory in June, while mass production was slated for the first quarter of 2012.

Once Fab 15 will come online, TSMC will be able to reach a combined 300mm capacity of 300,000 units a month and YP Chin, VP of operations and product development for the company, believes that in 2015 TSMC will be able to reach a total production capacity of 20 million 8-inch equivalent wafers.

TSMC's 28nm manufacturing process in expected to be used by a wide series of products, including AMD's and Nvidia's upcoming family of GPUs and the yet-in-development Nvidia Project Denver ARM-based processor.

In addition, mobile chip makers are also interested in this fabrication technology as it would enable them to build more powerful SoC devices without increasing power consumption.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company fabricates chips for a large number of companies, including AMD, Qualcomm, Altera, Broadcom, Conexant, Intel, Marvell, Nvidia, and VIA.

The company is the world's largest dedicated independent semiconductor foundry. (via DigiTimes)