Both, AMD's current as well as Nvidia's forthcoming graphics chips, are produced in 40 nanometer architecture in the factories of TSMC. Now the company confirmed problems during the production which caused the yield rate to drop to about 40 percent.
TSMC CEO Morris Chang promised improvements for the 40 nm chip production. Now the yield rate has been brought to a normal level. [Source: view picture gallery]
Original article: November 3, 2009 Fans of AMD's Radeon HD 5000 series might have noticed that the new graphics cards are quite rare at the moment. Furthermore there had also been a delivery bottleneck for the HD 4770 earlier this year. The reasons are obvious: The appropriate graphics chips are produced in a 40 nanometer process by TSMC. The CEO of the manufacturer now admitted that this process suffers from problems.
Morris Chang explained that the yield rate of the latest chip size dropped to only 40 percent. While the lowest rate of only 20 to 30 percent had to be dealt with in Q2 2009, the top result of 60 percent was reached in July. According to
digitimes.com the TSMC boss promised that the problems will be solved until year-end. If this is true, the availability of 40 nanometer chips and the appropriate graphics cards should become better soon after.
Nvidia also contracted TSMC to produce the forthcoming GT300, so a good market saturation at the launch of the new graphics card also depends on the chip manufacturer.
Update: January 22, 2010 Digitimes has
reported that by now the problems with TSMC's 40 nanometer yield rate have been solved. The quality of the new process is now on the same level as the 65 nanometer process, said a high ranked employee of the chip manufacturer. Detailed information have not been revealed yet.
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