It seems that demand for 28nm chips is higher than anyone could have expected. TSMC the biggest supplier of those chips is not capable of delivering enough of them to the market. They supply NVIDIA and QUALCOMM with 28nm procees chips. But according to DigiTimes, Qualcomm has already decided to order more chips from UMC and Globalfundaries. NVIDIA is reported to approach other fundaries too.
TSMC is trying to control the availability of 28nm chips on the market. They say that it is important to keep sufficient quality and therefore performance, and increased production could have impact on both. Well wouldn’t you say the same when most of the chips are ordered from your company?
According to DigiTimes, orders of TSMC’s 28nm process nodes in first quarter of this year is five times larger than those received in the fourth quarter of 2011. But TSMC will increase production after starting a new line of production, which is scheduled for Fall.
TSMC offers many variants of 28nm chips:
“TSMC’s 28nm process offering includes 28nm High Performance (28HP), 28nm High Performance Low Power (28HPL), 28nm Low Power (28LP), and 28nm High Performance Mobile Computing (28HPM). Among these technology offerings, 28HP, 28HPL and 28LP are all in volume production and 28HPM will be ready for production by the end of this year. The production-version design collateral of 28HPM has been distributed to most mobile computing customers for their product-design use”
We hope that those production problems won’t affect end users expecting their 28nm Radeons or GeForces, or has it already?
- READ MORE (Source): Qualcomm, Nvidia said to approach other foundries for 28nm production
