The newest report that showed up online suggest that TSMC will be investing over US $16 billion in a new chip factory and will actually skip 20nm manufacturing process for GPUs.


According to the report from Reuters, TSMC will invest a total of $500 billion Taiwanese dollars, which roughly converts to over US $16 billion, while the timeframe of the investment is still unknown. The same report also suggest that TSMC will not use the current 20nm manufacturing process due to power leaks and poor yields with big cores and high performance chips.

TSMC will eventually switch to 16nm FinFET manufacturing process sometime next year, according to the current schedule, and to 10nm in late 2016, but that is quite an optimistic schedule to say at least. Both TSMC and Samsung are currently manufacturing Apple's A8 SoC on 20nm manufacturing process and Qualcomm already has Snapdragon 810 SoC also done on 20nm process.

While GPUs will eventually move to 16nm FinFET manufacturing process at TSMC next year, or 14nm at Samsung and GlobalFoundries, Intel is currently happy with its 14nm manufacturing process and preparing for 10nm and has invested significant R&D funds in 7nm manufacturing process.

Recent studies and reports suggest that transition cost between nodes grows exponentially and with recent problems with 28nm and 20nm manufacturing process as well as and delays in switching to 16nm FinFET manufacturing process, shows just how hard things have become for chip manufacturers.




Source: Fudzilla.com.