Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company recently detailed its strategies for advanced low-power process designs over the next year and a half. In its press announcement, the company primarily focused on announcing its success of achieving a fully functional 64Mb SRAM yield on not one, not two, but three 28nm process nodes.

TSMC claims that 28nm development and ramp-up has remained on track since the original announcement made in September 2008. The three nodes that it plans on bringing to the table are “Low-power SiON” (28LP), “High-K Metal Gate high performance” (28HP) and “Low power with High-K Metal Gate” (28HPL). The 28LP node is the one we’ve been referring to in previous statements as TSMC has stated several times that this low power process will enter risk production in the end of Q1 2010, meaning around March.

The latest news TSMC has to offer are the schedules for the 28HP and 28HPL processes, which each begin risk production in the end of Q2 2010 (around June) and sometime in Q3 2010, respectively.

"We developed a gate-last approach for TSMC's 28nm high-k metal gate family that is superior in terms of transistor characteristics, high end and low end performance upside, and manufacturability," said Dr. Jack Sun, vice president, Research and Development, TSMC.

After recent talks about Nvidia’s upcoming choice between Globalfoundries and TSMC as a 28nm manufacturer, we are confident that TSMC is going to show some skin and fight hard for the green team’s attention. However, the company that can produce an efficient amount of positive chip yields without wasting loads of cash in the downhill 2010 depression is going to be the winner of a large graphics processing market chunk.