Dragon Boats and TSMC 20nm Update!

My luck continues as I missed last week’s typhoon. Fortunately it did not disrupt the annual Dragon Boat Festival. More than just a Chinese tradition, dragon boat racing is an international sports event with teams from around the world coming to Taiwan every year. It is very exciting with the colorful dragon boats and the wild beating of the drums to spur the rowers on. It is an early version of crew (rowing), which is one of the oldest Olympic sports I’m told.

Even more exciting, TSMC has 20nm up on the TSMC website now! Exciting for me at least! This is really cool stuff and it is right around the corner. I also like the new TSMC website and banner ads. It really does show a much more progressive communication style for a foundry.

TSMC provides the broadest range of technologies and services in the Dedicated IC Foundry segment. In addition to general-purpose logic process technology, TSMC’s More-Than-Moore technologies support customers’ wide-ranging needs for devices that integrate specialty features with CMOS logic ICs. TSMC’s More-Than-Moore technologes offer the segment’s richest technology mix, and unmatched manufacturing excellence. Through TSMC Open Innovation Platform™, we provide a robust portfolio of time-to-volume foundry and design services, including front-end design, mask and prototyping services, backend packaging and test services, and front to back-logistics, to speed up More-Than-Moore innovations.

20nm technology is under development to provide best speed/power value for both performance driven products like CPU (Central Processing Unit), GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), APU (Accelerated Processing Unit), FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) and mobile computing applications including smartphones, tablets and high-end SoC (System-on-a-Chip).

In regards to the constant 20nm scaling questions, TSMC 20nm is said to offer a 30%+ performance gain and 25%+ power savings versus 28nm. Has anybody heard what other foundries are claiming lately? It will be interesting to see what the fabless companies can do with 20nm silicon. The success of 28nm will certainly be hard to beat but I can tell you one thing, the fabless guys are spending a lot of time in Hschinsu, EDA and IP vendors are camping out there as well. You will be hard pressed to tell the difference between the old guard IDMs and the leading edge fabless company’s process technology groups, except of course their CAPEX! Expect 20nm risk production to start in Q4 2013, two years to the quarter after 28nm.

TSMC is the world’s largest dedicated semiconductor foundry, providing the industry’s leading process technology and the foundry segment’s largest portfolio of process-proven libraries, IPs, design tools and reference flows. The Company’s managed capacity in 2011 totaled 13.22 million (8-inch equivalent) wafers and is the first foundry to provide 28nm production capabilities.

TSMC’s mission is to be the trusted technology and capacity provider for the global logic IC industry for years to come.

Notice it says “capacity” now. Company mission statements are also reminders for employees so you can bet capacity will be on everyone’s mind for process nodes to come, believe it.