14 DAY TRIAL // Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (better known as TSMC to the world) is a company that contracts the manufacturing of different computer hardware parts from their original designers that have not enough production facilities. This works great for both parties involved, as the original manufacturers can bring more products on the market and the contracting foundry is leasing its production lines for some big sums.
According to the Web based news site DigiTimes the TSMC company has been ordered by the graphics chips and cards manufacturer Nvidia to supply additional G80 graphics chips because of increasing sales that grew by 20 percent in the last quarter of the year. During the second quarter of the year, Nvidia placed an average order of 45.000 to 50.000 wafers, order that was increased to the level of 60.000 8 inch sized wafers per month for the third quarter.
As the TSMC is an independent company, it has no problems working with competing companies. So, TSMC is expecting to start the production of the graphics core chips for the upcoming Fusion platform for AMD, too. It is said that while AMD is going to make most of the CPU part of the Fusion in its own production facilities or contract the Chartered Semiconductor company for them, most of the GPU part will be handed down to the TSMC foundries. The Fusion platform from AMD will consist of a processor made using the 45nm technology and the silicon-on-insulator (SOI for short) package at AMD's own Fab 36 and Fab 38, while the GPU will be produced using the 55nm process by TSMC. Another, dedicated production plant will then test and package the two components (CPU+GPU) together in order to form a single Fusion processor.
TSMC recently upgraded some of its production lines in order to accommodate the technological process needed to build the 45nm products from AMD that are supposed to enter production during the year 2008. Processors and GPUs based on the 32nm process will arrive in 2009, while the smaller 22nm based ones will see mass production starting with 2011.