by Anton Shilov
04/03/2003 | 10:50 AM
Although Taiwanese contract semiconductor manufacturers originally stated that they will be able to produce chips using 90nm technology already in the third quarter or, at least, by the end of 2002, it now becomes clear that neither TSMC nor UMC are able to mass-produce complex commercial chips based on the 90nm fabrication process even now.
<%BANNER[article]%>TSMC pushed further its risk production using 90nm technology from Q4 2002 to the second quarter 2003 in August last year, saying that the company had no clients for its advanced process technology. Recently the Taiwanese largest chip-maker informed it would start the risk production in the late second or early third quarter 2003, while the mass-production of 90nm circuits is slated to begin in the first half of 2004.
Officials over TSMC may be right stating that the demand on 90nm nodes is very low at the moment, however, if there is no offering, the demand will simply not emerge at all. On the other hand, Xilinx already received its first commercial products made using 90nm technology from both its foundry partners, namely IBM and UMC, thus, deployment of 90nm fabrication process seems to be a critical task for contract chip-makers as it will help to land more orders from various companies.
The newest manufacturing technologies are usually adopted by a limited number of successful companies, such as NVIDIA, Broadcom, Qualcomm or Xilinx. The latter pair of firms deal with rather simplistic processors, so, there are basically no problems with their ramp on the new manufacturing technology. NVIDIA develops very intricate GPUs and spends quite a lot of time designing them for particular manufacturing facilities.
In short, companies like Xilinx usually can begin producing their chips using newest fabrication processes, while firms like NVIDIA should spend some time testing and trying the technology out. We should note that those companies, who deal with simplistic products usually do not really need the most advanced fabrication processes. Since not a lot of companies really want to invest in something new these days, mass production of 90nm chips may start in late 2003 or early 2004, firstly because there are no customers for such technology, secondly because TSMC will not be able to produce such processors in large quantities until the first half of next year, while mass production at UMC is slated to start in the third quarter 2003.