Items tagged with TSMC
Watch out, Qualcomm; Huawei is knocking at your door. The Chinese tech giant has just announced its next-generation SoC that will power its upcoming flagship smartphone family in late 2018 and beyond. The Kirin 980 is the successor to the Kirin 970 and is the very first commercial 7nm chip that is being manufactured by TSMC. Due to the process shrink from 10nm to 7nm, Huawei is boasting unparalleled levels of performance and efficiency. The Kirin 980 crams in 6.9 billion transistors in a 1cm2die and promises a 20 percent improvement in power efficiency. Considering that we all crave the best...
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AMD made two big announcements after the closing bell today that affects its hardware business. There is some executive shuffling on the personnel side, and some changes with regards to 7nm production. On the personnel side, Jim Anderson, who served as AMD's General Manager and Senior Vice President of Global Computing and Graphics Sales, is leaving the company effective September 4th. Anderson decided to leave his post to take a position as President and CEO of Lattice Semiconductor. This is quite the move up the corporate latter for Anderson, who will also serve on the company's board of directors....
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Whoever oversees IT for TSMC's factories is probably in hot water right now. The company suffered from a major virus attack recently that forced it to shut down some of its factories. TSMC has now stepped up and admitted that while the cause of the shutdowns was a virus infection, the ultimate cause of that infection was unpatched Windows systems. Initially, TSMC was vague about the exact cause only admitting that the issue was an unspecified computer virus. TSMC has stated that the specific virus that infected its systems leading to the shutdown was WannaCry, which has previously been linked to...
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Tawian Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) is recovering from a major internal computer virus outbreak that ravaged its systems, forcing the chipmaker to shut down several factories. A full recovery is expected by Monday, August 6, however the fallout from the virus will result in shipment delays and additional costs, the company said. The virus affected TSMC's computer systems and fabrication tools in Taiwan. TSMC attributed the outbreak to a some sort of misoperation when installing software for a new tool, though the company did not go into specifics. Once the virus tool went online, it spread...
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Things are looking up for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) after the company posted a decline in revenue for its quarter ending in June. TSMC is now predicting significant increases in revenue moving through the third and fourth quarters of 2018. The gain in revenue is, according to industry sources, thanks to the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 11 Series GPU and Apple's A12 SoC. Apple is rolling out three new iPhones in September, according to rumors, that will all use the A12 SoC that TSMC builds on its 7nm process technology. NVIDIA is also tapping TSMC for its GeForce GTX 11 GPU tech...
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Everyone wants some of what TSMC is cooking with its new 7nm process that will be used for chips from multiple companies. TSMC's 7nm production lines will be used by NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Sony, and Apple. To meet the crushing demand for the parts, TSMC is reportedly accelerating its production schedule. Sources are claiming that many of TSMC's fabless customers are skipping the 10nm process tech more readily available and moving directly to 7nm chips. So far in addition to the companies previously mentioned HiSilicon, MediaTek, and Xilinx have all confirmed they will be joining in on the TSMC...
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People claiming to be familiar with TSMC's operations are saying that the company has kicked off production of the next generation processors for the new iPhone models that will land later this year. The processor is expected to be called the A12 and it will reportedly use a 7nm design. This new design will be more power efficient, smaller, and faster than the 10nm A11 chips that are currently in the iPhone 8 and iPhone X. Gains in battery life and performance are important for Apple; the smartphone industry is stagnating as users have stopped upgrading devices due to miniscule upgrades...
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Scuttlebutt has been going around for months now that suggest Sony could be getting ready to plop its next-generation game console onto the market this year. Other rumors have suggested that it might be several years out, 2020 to be exact, before the PlayStation 5 breaks cover. Sony is still selling PS4 consoles like gangbusters and it hasn't been long since the PS4 Pro launched making 2020 more likely. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has now announced that its 7nm CLN7FF chips have gone into volume production throwing more fuel on the PS5 rumor fire. In a chat with AnandTech,...
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TSMC has broken ground on a new 5nm fab that will be used to produce the world's first 5-nanometer chips starting in 2020. TSMC builds chips for numerous manufacturers, including NVIDIA, Qualcomm and many others. The new Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 mobile chips coming this year are built on the TSMC 7nm technology. With TSMC promising the first chips using its new 5nm tech in 2020, that would likely mean we can expect the first 5nm chips from fabless semiconductor partners like Qualcomm and others, roughly in that same time frame. The groundbreaking ceremony was held in Taiwan and the facility will...
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The ink has barely dried on the press release announcing Qualcomm's Snapdragon 845, and there are already rumors swirling about its eventual successor: the Snapdragon 855. The Snapdragon 845 is built on a refined version of Samsung's 10nm FinFET process (an evolution of the tech used for the Snapdragon 835), however, the Snapdragon 855 will be built on new 7nm process technology. Whereas Samsung has been responsible for manufacturing both the Snapdragon 835 and Snapdragon 845, Nikkei is reporting that Qualcomm has selected TSMC to produce the Snapdragon 855. TMSC is also reportedly being tapped...
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In the high stakes game of semiconductors, technologies related to processor nodes are closely guarded secrets as companies try to trump one another with die shrinks and other advances in silicon research and development. As you might imagine, espionage can be a problem. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) believes it was an issue with a former employee who it accuses of stealing 28nm trade secrets.TSMC believes an ex-employee identified only as Hsu stole information about the company's 28nm process technology when he was being head hunted for employment at Shanghai Hueli Microelectronics...
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Reports coming out of China indicate that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has inked deals with NVIDIA and Qualcomm to produce high performance computing (HPC) chips that will be used for artificial intelligence applications, among other things. That includes the fabrication of NVIDIA's next-generation Volta GPUs using a 12-nanometer FinFET manufacturing process. Rumors had surfaced in January that NVIDIA had tapped TSMC to build its Volta GPUs, and assuming the new reports are accurate, it would appear that contract negotiations have been finalized. TSMC certainly has the capacity....
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ARM and TSMC have become quite the duo over the years, combining the latter's cutting-edge process technologies with the former's processor IP. It is a partnership that has been working, hence why the two committed earlier this year to collaborating on a marketable 7nm FinFET chip. The fruits of their efforts have paid off—ARM announced today that it has licensed its Artisan physical IP platform for TSMC's 7nm FinFET process technology to Xilinx, the fabless semiconductor company known for inventing the field programmable gate array (FPGA). Xilinx isn't a new customer by any means. It has partnered...
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We learned earlier this month that Intel had purchased its very own ARM license and will soon be manufacturing ARM-based processors for third-parties. Intel, which has remarkable chip fabrication capabilities, however, won’t be producing ARM chips of its own design. This newest development already has analysts stirring the pot when it comes to the next wave of iPhone rumors. With the iPhone 7 less than a month away, analysts are already looking further into the future towards the hypothetical iPhone 8. Analysts speaking with the Nikkei Asian Review indicate that Intel has already approached Apple...
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