America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up - Oscar Wilde
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E-beam delay bad news for TSMC
TSMC MAY HAVE taken another hit to its competitive edge, as reports emerge the Taiwanese semi fab firm is dealing with a crippling three month delay on 300mm multiple electron-beam (e-beam) maskless lithography equipment, which was due back at the start of Q1.
E-beam maskless lithography, which involves scanning a beam of electrons in a pattern across a film covered surface, exposing bits of it and etching very tiny structures later transferred to the substrate material, is increasingly important for the manufacture of integrated circuits and semiconductor components.
Back in October 2008, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company signed up e-beam maker, Mapper Lithography, to ship its 300mm multiple e-beam maskless lithography platform for use in TSMC's process development and device prototyping. But, according to Dodgytimes sources, "technological issues" have caused huge delays.
The delays could apparently be so serious as to interfere and, in some cases, disrupt TSMC customers' technology roadmaps, slowing transition to sub-32nm process nodes.
TSMC's chief, Rick Tsai, has already noted his foundry won't move to sub-32nm process tech before 2011, but has said the firm is working with equipment suppliers to co develop multiple e-beam technology for 22nm and smaller. µ
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LOL Dodgytimes LOL
TSMC 40 Nm process may be short, in recent article over weekend. unfortunately direct link is already spiffed, so heres digest view of GT300 Tape Out & inclusion of possible 40 Nm Probs:
NVIDIA's upcoming next-generation graphics processor, codenamed GT300 is on course for launch later this year. Its development seems to have crossed an important milestone, with news emerging that the company has already taped out some of the first engineering samples of the GPU, under the A1 batch. The development of the GPU is significant since it is the first high-end GPU to be designed on the 40 nm silicon process. Both NVIDIA and AMD however, are facing issues with the 40 nm manufacturing node of TSMC, the principal foundry-partner for the two. Due to this reason, the chip might be built by another foundry partner (yet to be known) the two are reaching out to. UMC could be a possibility, as it has recently announced its 40 nm node that is ready for "real, high-performance" designs.
The GT300 comes in three basic forms, which perhaps are differentiated by batch quality processing: G300 (that make it to consumer graphics, GeForce series), GT300 (that make it to high-performance computing products, Tesla series), and G200GL (that make it to professional/enterprise graphics, Quadro series). From what we know so far, the core features 512 shader processors, a revamped data processing model in the form of MIMD, and will feature a 512-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface to churn out around 256 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The GPU is compliant with DirectX 11, which makes its entry with Microsoft Windows 7 later this year, and can be found in release candidate versions of the OS already.
Older rule that Gb/s bandwidth is good indicator of 3DMark number been slipping as GPU Gets More Complex. Vantage score of 256K Be Bit OutLandish, yet it fits numbers, well. it fits comparrisons.
RoadMap That Charles, Get SwitchBlade, errrr, SlideRule Out & Tell Us, When Oh, When & Whos UMC. Lets see. United Marine Charles, ummm. ?Noooo.
Maybe: Ultee'(Milatary)....Do-Dah,Do-Dah, CampTown Races, Laugh & Sing. Do-Dee, Do-Dah,Day.(BetON: oLD gRAY mARE) Tighten Up TSMC. Commissioned.