TSMC is ramping its 28nm process three times as fast as the company ramped the 40nm node.
"I’ve been there for the launch of the 65nm and 40nm nodes and have never seen five customers ramp a new technology as they’re doing with 28nm – it’s got three times the momentum of 40nm," Maria Marced, President of TSMC Europe, told EW today,
"The number of tape-outs on 28nm compared to 40nm has been triple at the same stage of production."
The five 28nm customers are Xilinx, Altera, Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm. A couple of weeks ago the CEO of Xilinx, Moshe Gavrielov, told EW he thought 28nm would be a "fabulous node - a lot of learning went into 28nm to avoid the problems of 40nm," said Gavrielov.
TSMC is currently installing production tools in its 28nm GigaFab. "The tools will be in Fab 15 by the end of the quarter," said Marced, "and we’ll start production in the first half of 2012. "We expect, in Q4, that 28nm will be 2% of revenues. By the second half of next year it will be 10% plus."
TSMC, as the first foundry to produce on 28nm, feels its gate last manufacturing philosophy has been justified. The IBM club - Samsung, GloFo and the rest - have gone for gate first at 28nm – but have expressed their intention to go gate last on 20nm.
"20nm is going to be challenging," said Marced, "but the good news for us is that it will be our second generation of gate last.".
The unspoken implication is that 20nm will be the first generation of gate last for TSMC’s significant competitors.
Most of TSMC’s growth next year is expected to come from advanced geometries, and TSMC’s plan is to introduce the first version of its 20nm process in the second half of 2012 – with tools, shuttles etc. A 20nm ARM Cortex-A15 has been taped out.
TSMC will spend $7.3m on capex this year, although Q3 revenue of $3.66bn was 3.6% down on Q2 and the expectation is that TSMC’s Q4 revenues will show a decline of between 1-3%.
TSMC’s expectation is that the industry’s excess inventory will be trimmed off by the end of the year.
TSMC expects to end 2011 with 9% growth over 2010 – at the end of the first nine months the company was expecting 14%. For the semiconductor industry as a whole TSMC expects 1% growth in 2011.
Despite the fact that ASML says it won’t have a 450mm lithography tool out until 2018 "or thereabouts", Marced is sticking to her prediction at the October IEF in Seville that TSMC will have a 450mm pilot line running in 2013-14 and a production fab in 2015-16.