Posted on Friday, April 06 2012 @ 16:09 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Industry sources
confided to DigiTimes that TSMC's 28nm production capacity is drastically short of demand, and that the shortage isn't expected to relax until late Q3 2012. The sources say TSMC is conservative about expanding 28nm foundry capacity in order to maintain gross margins.
Qualcomm, in view of the shortage, has shifted some orders to United Microelectronics, but has been unable to meet its clients' demand for processors for smartphones and tablet PCs, the sources indicated.
AMD launched the 28nm-based Radeon HD 7970 in the first quarter of 2012, but has actually shipped a relatively small volume of the GPU due to TSMC's short 28nm capacity, the sources noted.
Nvidia launched only one 28nm-based GPU, GeForce GTX 680, in late March and has had to delay the launch of Kepler series GPU models due to the shortage, the sources said.
