14 DAY TRIAL // Apparently, despite what some may suspect, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is not exactly worried about how Intel recently announced that it would be manufacturing chips for another company.
Chip makers like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices often, if not usually, let foundries, like TSMC and Globalfoundries handle the actual task of manufacturing their chips.
This is what enabled said foundries to grow and end up making semiconductor wafers for most hardware makers.
More recently, however, it was revealed that, starting sometime in 2011, Intel will handle the making of Achronix' new line of FPGA processors.
Said chips will be known as Speedster22i and will be employed in industrial applications, networking and telecommunications besides just consumer products.
This may have come across as more or less surprising because the Santa Clara, California-based giant never actually made chips for third parties before.
Now, a report made by Digitimes suggests that TSMC is not exactly concerned about this recent turn of events.
At first glance, it may look like this was a blow to the foundry, considering that, so far, Achronix has used TSMC's 65nm process.
Nevertheless, while it did lose one customer, the chip manufacturer is not concerned with the possible Intel threat and intends to maintain its strong hold over the manufacturing business.
Intel will build Acrhonix FPGA chips based on the 22nm manufacturing process technology, a node that TSMC decided to skip back in April, so as to go from 28nm straight to 20nm.
It is also suggested that allowing Achronix access to its 22nm process may be beneficial for Intel as well, possibly proving lucrative for its own CPU business in the long run.
X-bit Labs points out that such customers as the US military institutions only work with hardware built exclusively in the US.
Since this would mostly exclude TSMC-made Achronix chips, Intel's move may be part of a tactic to make sure that chips capable of complementing its own microprocessors continue to exist.