Traci Su, Taipei; Jessie Shen

 

Pure-play foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has said that its plans to start commercial production of chips using 28nm process this year remains unchanged. TSMC expects 28nm chips to start contributing to company revenues in the third quarter of 2011, and sales from the advanced technology will account for 2-3% of its total wafer sales in the last quarter of the year.

TSMC also reiterated its target of 20% growth in 2011 consolidated revenues (denominated in US dollars).

The remarks were made following speculation that launch of Nvidia's Kepler GPU generation may be pushed back to 2012 due to manufacturing issues at TSMC. However, according to Nvidia, its schedule has not changed. It expect to begin production in 2011 with products based on Kepler being available in 2012. AMD's upcoming Southern Islands GPU reportedly will have a similar schedule, industry sources have observed, with AMD also contracting TSMC to build the 28nm GPU generation.

Nobunaga Chai, semiconductor analyst at Digitimes Research, has commented that any production transfer will need to go through a certain learning curve before the process attains satisfactory yields, and it is understandable that current yield rates for TSMC's 28nm are not mature. Especially for performance-driven devices like GPUs, improving the yield rate would require more time than that for products with simpler architectures like FPGAs.

However, TSMC should find it easier to improve its yields on 28nm compared to 40nm as the latter requires equipment upgrades, Chai said. The foundry previously spent about a year raising its 40nm process yields to a satisfactory level.