NVIDIA and AMD to Be Affected by TSMC's 40nm Yield Problems

The world's two leading vendors of graphics processing units, NVIDIA and AMD, are expected to be faced with GPU shipment delays due to new 40nm yield issues that have recently been reported by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Although these issues are expected to be solved within the quarter, the two chip makers, which have either launched their latest GPUs or are about to announce their new 40nm-based products, could be affected by the reported problems.

According to a recent news article on Digitimes, TSMC's chairman and CEO Morris Chang has announced that the reported issues with the 40nm process technology are expected to be solved by the end of this quarter. The problems, which have led to a 40% drop in yield rates for the 40nm node, are related to certain chamber matching issues. TSMC's main customers for said manufacturing technology are GPU vendors NVIDIA and AMD. While the latter's new generation of 40nm-based graphics cards have already been launched on the market, the Santa Clara, California-based NVIDIA is yet to formerly introduce the much-anticipated 40nm-based GT300 chips, according to previous rumors.

There were a number of reports regarding TSMC's 40nm yield issues over the course of the past months, although, back in July 2009, at an investors conference, Chang said that the yield rates for said process had improved to 60%, compared to the 20-30% in the second quarter of 2009. This has affected AMD, which launched its first 40nm card with the introduction of the Radeon HD 4770, the world's first graphics card with a 40nm GPU.

In related news, TSMC announced that the strong demand for 40nm and 65nm technologies had led its 2009 capex to rise further and it expected it to be around US$2.7 billion. The company revealed that the 45nm/40nm process accounted for 4% of its Q3 revenue, compared to the 1% announced in the first and second quarters.