14 DAY TRIAL // The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company has been recently making the headlines, mostly due to the low yields of its 40nm manufacturing node, an issue that has affected both NVIDIA and AMD with their future graphics cards. However, the company has announced today that it has become the first foundry to successfully achieve 28nm functional 64Mb SRAM yield, a milestone that has been reached on all three 28nm manufacturing nodes. All of TSMC's 28nm manufacturing processes are based on the company's Open Innovation Platform and are expected to enter the development and ramp-up stages, according to the announcement TSMC made in September last year.
“Achieving 64Mb SRAM yield across all three 28nm process nodes is striking. It is particularly noteworthy because this achievement demonstrates the manufacturing benefits of the gate-last approach that we developed for the two TSMC 28nm high-k metal gate processes,” explained Dr. Jack Sun, vice president, Research and Development at TSMC.
According to TSMC, the 28LP process is expected to enter risk production at the end of next year's Q1, while the 28HP risk production is scheduled for the end of Q2, followed by the 28HPL risk production in the third quarter. The first has been designed as a solution for cellular and mobile applications, providing them with a fast time-to-market and low-cost technology. As for TSMC's 28nm HP process, the company said that this was expected to support a wide range of devices, including CPUs, GPUs, Chipsets, FPGAs, networking, video game consoles, and mobile computing applications that were performance demanding. By comparison, the 28nm HPL process has been designed for medium-high performance, but in a package that offers a low-power, low-leakage design.
The last of the three 28nm manufacturing nodes is aimed at devices such as cell phones, smart netbooks, but also wireless communication and portable consumer electronics that require low leakage.