28nm Chips Remain in Short Supply at TSMC

By Douglas Perry
published

TSMC is reportedly still having problems ramping up its 28nm production capacity.

According to a report published by Digitimes, the capacity shortage is expected to ease beginning in the third quarter of this year, industry sources told the publication.

The article further suggests that Qualcomm moved some of its 28nm orders to United Microelectronics, as TSMC has not been able to meet demand for smartphones and tablet PCs yet. AMD's 28nm GPU shipments are also behind as is Nvidia's Kepler architecture, Digitimes said.

TSMC reportedly remains "conservative" about a 28 nm expansion and is focused to maintain gross margins at this time. As a result, 28nm supply is only improving slowly.

Douglas Perry
33 Comments Comment from the forums
  • beayn
    The ol' stock market at work, slowing things down again. Damn the french for inventing it!
    Reply
  • Hulk sad... :(
    Reply
  • phatboe
    I thought TSMC scrapped the 32nm node to focus on and accelerate the 28nm node. Now they claim to want to be more conservative? Yeah this may save TSMC a few bucks here and there but it is destroying it's partner's profits. Mean while Intel is gaining market share in almost every sector that they are involved in. It's so sad that the TSMC is holding back progress for so many companies all to save a few bucks.
    Reply
  • Unolocogringo
    If yields are 50% and a wafer cost $1000.00.
    You process 1000 wafers a day that equals half a million($500,000) dollar a day loss in wafer cost alone ,not including labor and processing cost!
    Can you blame them now?
    Reply
  • JAYDEEJOHN
    They arent doing anymore yields/good di scenarios, that ended with 40nm.
    Its strictly per wafer
    This ramp up is actually much faster than 40nm, as the 4770 was one of its first, and came way before we saw decent yields and numbers on 40nm, so 3rd qtr still looks good comparatively
    Reply
  • maxinexus
    You are so generous with 50% yields Ricky! Sometime ago I read article about closer to 20% yields per wafer. That is why we don't see Keplers cards anywhere and if they are in small quantities. That is no good for nvidia.
    Reply
  • Intel may have to produce everybody's chips. They are the only company that knows how to do this thing.
    Reply
  • Unolocogringo
    I have not read any articles stating yields in a while just that they had gotten better.
    I thought i was being conservative with the 50% and it gave good round numbers for my example.
    Looks like it is worse than i thought.
    Reply
  • memadmax
    "If you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself"
    Reply
  • @samIHam: Well, TSMC is leading Intel in process technology. Last time I checked, 28nm is smaller than 32nm.

    Of course, you like most other Intel fanboys will just pretend like Intel's 22nm process is already out and doing well, even though here in the real world it's severely delayed, with no hard ETA yet. Even when it is finally available, it may not be available in much volume.

    ::Queue up people stating that Intel could do better, but they're deliberately choosing not to because AMD isn't 'competive enough'::
    Reply