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TSMC Having 40nm Yield Issues, Again

October 30th, 2009 by Sue Hardware, NEWS2 Comments

Earlier this year TSMC claimed the 40nm yield rates had improved from 30% to 60%, but good times don’t last long – a recent post at Digitimes suggests that the company is having another problem with the technology, with the yield rate dropping to 40%.

Morris Chang, the chairman and CEO said the decrease of 40nm yield is resulted by chamber matching issues, and promised to solve the issue within the quarter.

However, the yield issue will very probably impact the shipping schedules of the main GPU vendors – AMD and NVIDIA.

2 Responses to “TSMC Having 40nm Yield Issues, Again”

  1. no Says:
    October 31st, 2009 at 4:39 am

    So they throw away 6 out of 10 chips?

  2. MathieuB Says:
    October 31st, 2009 at 7:04 am

    @no

    Not exactly, they can keep some of them for lower end products, such as the 5750 and 5770, simply by disabling the not functional part.

    The problem with this though is that it lowers the availability of the Radeon 5xxx line-up, especially the 5850 and 5870, while demand is still as high, increasing prices.

    Hopefully, this will get resolved for the holidays season, when demand surges.

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