TSMC to max-out manufacturing for 7nm parts with orders from AMD, Apple and Nvidia

TSMC to come back strongly from a series of setbacks over the past nine months with full order books for 7nm chips from AMD, Apple and Nvidia

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is ramping up volume manufacturing for its high-performance 7nm parts following an increase in process capacity utilisation rate, as well as big chip orders from AMD and Apple.

That's according to DigiTimes, which claims that the company expects its 7nm manufacturing processes to run at full capacity starting from the third quarter of 2019.

TSMC has experienced a series of setbacks over the past nine months. In August last year, the company revealed that some of its servers had been infected by a variant of the WannaCry malware, causing a delay to production schedules.

Then, earlier this year, TSMC said that more than 10,000 wafers created at FAB 14B were found to be defective due to chemical contamination. Following that incident, the company was forced to stop production for some time and to revise its earnings guidance.

According to DigiTimes, strongly rising demand for 7nm chips could help TSMC to quickly overcome those setbacks. The company is shifting to extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography manufacturing processes in order to reduce complexity, and to cut the cost and time associated with creating chips for clients at such dense process nodes.

TSMC's most high-profile 7nm client at the moment is AMD, which is set to experience a significant growth in sales in the second half of 2019, driven by 7nm Ryzen and Epyc CPUs, according to DigiTimes.

AMD has already enjoyed a strong increase in sales from first-generation Epyc and Ryzen, and further increases in the demand for servers, motherboards and notebooks in the second half of 2019 is also expected to help the company consolidate its position in the market against its major rival Intel.

Analysts expect AMD to roll out the 64-core Rome enterprise line-up and Ryzen 3000 series in the second half of the year.

AMD is also expected to launch Navi GPUs sometime this year, which will also be built by TSMC on its 7nm process node. More details about Navi are expected at the same time as the company's Ryzen 3000 launch.

AMD is not the only company that plans to build parts using TSMC's 7nm technology.

Analysts believe TSMC's high-performance 7nm parts will appear in a range of next-gen GPUs, CPUs, server chips, as well as from Apple, HiSilicon, Nvidia, Qualcomm, MediaTek and many others.

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