Last week TechEye tried to pin down TSMC and get something of a straight answer about where the fab was in terms of fixing its 40nm yields and what exactly the problem was to begin with.
While we got little joy from our earlier polite requests, it would appear that the firm’s PR rep does respond to brute force, although not particularly effectively, as she failed to answer a single one of our questions, opting instead to send a banal, canned statement.
“40nm and 45nm yields continue to improve at an even faster pace in the last three months,” we were told.
But that’s when the grandiose hot air blowing really gets out of whack. “TSMC is pioneering the 40nm and 45nm foundry markets,” the statement went on, adding “TSMC is by far the leader in those technologies.”
Funny that, because we were under the impression it was GlobalFoundries which led the entire foundry industry in time to volume on the 45nm node with tens of millions of products already in the marketplace based on its fab technology.
TSMC went on to say that it “expects to pioneer the 28nm foundry market,” and be “virtually the only effective capacity holder in these markets.”
“Virtually”?
When we asked GlobalFoundries what it thought of such fanciful claims, Jon Carvill, the firm’s head of global comms told TechEye his firm’s “industry-leading cycle times and time to mature yield enable a significant competitive advantage in allowing our customers to scale advanced production in volume.”
“We expect this success to continue at the 32nm and 28nm technology nodes (w/HKMG) as we make these technologies widely available to our customers in 2010,” he went on, bursting TSMC’s virtual bubble.
To rub salt in an already open and leaking wound, Carvill added “We've already seen tremendous interest in 28nm HKMG technology underscored by recent announcements with ARM and Qualcomm.”
Yep, TSMC, so, who is on your customer list for 28nm? Or will we have to wait two weeks for you to get back to us?
Eh, are you sure you didn't have the wrong number or something? Either that or you got a PR who was reading off of a particularly old hymn sheet.
32nm is no more at both TSMC and GloFo, AFAIK.
Of the 45nm/40nm silicon manufactured by Global Foundries, how much is 45nm SOI wafers for AMD CPUs?, how much is standard bulk 45nm/40nm foundry business that would compare to TSMC, UMC, SMIC and the other world foundries?
My information is that 45nm/40nm bulk CMOS production at Global Foundries is very close to 0. The 45nm ramp up in the slide is the single-product Silicon on Insulator process for AMD CPUs
By the way, I believe that AMD has publicly said that it may not use SOI in 28nm, so all that SOI ramp up experience in SOI may not be that useful