Posted on Thursday, October 24 2013 @ 15:00 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
TSMC announced that it plans to start volume production of 20nm wafers in the first quarter of 2014. The Taiwanese foundry also revealed that 16nm FinFET will follow 20nm in one year. Full details
at X-bit Labs.
“We will begin volume production of 20nms in the first quarter 2014. That's 90 days from now. 16nm will follow 20nm in one year. We view both 20nm and 16nm as virtually one node,” said Morris Chang, chief executive officer and chairman of TSMC, during a conference call with financial analysts.
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“Specifically on 20nm we have received five product tape-outs and scheduled more than 30 tape-outs in this year and next year from mobile computing, CPU and PLD [programmable logic device] segments. And all those tape-outs represent big volumes. Design ecosystem on 20nm has been validated in real products and is ready to support customers. Yield learning is in line or better than the 28nm path. We expect a fast ramp of 20nm next year, with revenue from 20nm in 2014 bigger than that of 28nm in 2012. You see 20nm will be starting next year whereas 28nm actually started in the fourth quarter – third, fourth quarter of 2011. So the corresponding point for 28nm was 2012. But our ramp in 20nm in 2014 is going to be faster than the ramp for 28nm in 2012. While our 28nm ramp was a record for TSMC, 20nm ramp will be even faster by about 30%,” said Mr. Chang.
