Over the past few months, the Taiwanese company TSMC has faced a number of rather serious difficulties. First, some of the company's servers were infected with the WannaCry virus. And earlier this year, an accident occurred at one of the company's factories, due to which more than 10 semiconductor wafers were damaged, and the production line was stopped. However, an increase in orders for 000nm products will help the company recover from these difficulties, according to DigiTimes.
It is reported that HiSilicon and AMD are actively increasing the volume of orders for the production of chips according to 7-nm technology standards. In addition, demand for TSMC's 7nm products from Android smartphone manufacturers is reported to be on the rise. Therefore, industry sources claim that TSMC's 7nm lines will reach full production capacity as early as the third quarter of 2019.
The increase in demand from AMD looks completely justified. The company is already selling graphics cards and computing accelerators based on 7nm Vega II GPUs. In addition, AMD should start selling its Ryzen 3000 desktop processors this summer, which will also be made using the 7nm process technology. And finally, AMD Radeon graphics cards based on 7nm Navi GPUs are expected to be released in the second half of the year. In addition, sources told DigiTimes that TSMC will be manufacturing “a new generation of CPUs, GPUs, AI-related chips, and server chips” this year using the 7nm process technology.
Of course, AMD is not the only TSMC customer that needs 7nm chips. For example, Apple will likely continue to use TSMC to manufacture 7nm processors for its devices. Qualcomm and MediaTek are also likely to increase orders for 7nm chips. Note that in order to meet the growing demand, TSMC is rumored to have started mass production of 7nm chips using deep ultraviolet (EUV) lithography at the end of March, and the shipments of such chips will begin in the second half of 2019.
Source: 3dnews.ru