14 DAY TRIAL // The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world's largest contract chipmaker, has recently declared that it has been seeing improved yields for its 40nm manufacturing node, which are now considerably higher than earlier this year. According to the company's chairman and CEO, Morris Chang, the yield rates on the 40/45nm manufacturing process have improved to 60%, up from the 30% earlier this year. This essentially means that companies like NVIDIA and ATI will be able to introduce their next-generation chips in time for this year's holiday shopping season, if not earlier, at the much anticipated Windows 7 launch, in October.
According to a recent news-report on Digitimes, TSMC has seen an improvement of 30% for its 40nm manufacturing node, double that of what was reported earlier this year. The claim was made by the company's CEO and chairman, Morris Chang, who also said that the foundry company was expecting to produce about 30,000 wafers on the 40nm during the third quarter alone.
What this essentially means for the industry is that both NVIDIA and AMD, which are customers of the foundry company, will be able to launch their much-anticipated 40nm parts later this year. This will essentially turn into a race for the first 40nm-based graphics card to be launched before or near the launch of Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system. On that note, there have been a series of reports and rumors on the Internet, regarding the launch of AMD's RV870 and NDIVIA's presumably codenamed GT300 graphics chips.
As far as TSMC's plans for the future are concerned, Mr. Chang said that the company was expecting to ramp 32nm production in the first quarter of 2010, with 28nm following sometime between the end of 2010 and the start of 2011. This will be a noteworthy battle for new manufacturing technologies, as the newly-founded GLOBALFOUNDRIES has stated that it plans to start 28nm production in 2010, when Fab 2 is scheduled to be finished.