Taipei, Nov. 15, 2012 (CENS)-- Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) is reported to be the sole foundry of Xilinx’s 20nm chips, for which the chip vendor has recently announced its strategy, according to industry sources.

Xilinx is optimizing its 8 Series filed programmable gateway arrays (FPGAs), the 20nm All Programmable chips. Compared with 28nm FPGAs, the 20nm chips deliver double efficiency with only half of the power consumption. Furthermore, the latest chips integrate 1.5 folds to two folds more devices on them than their predecessors.

TSMC has completed R&D of 20nm process technology and begun taking pilot orders.

TSMC has secured hefty 20nm FPGA orders from Xilinx and Altera, but has yet to begin volume production of its 20nm and CoWoS (chip on wafer on substrate) processes.

Other vendors than the two FPGA suppliers have also reportedly placed orders with the foundry giant for 20nm process supply. They include Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, MediaTek and Apple.

(by Ken Liu)