Comment by guardiangod

5 years ago

According to the Chinese article, for TSMC the 28nm node is their most profitable node. They have mastered its production process.

Sony used to make their own CIS and only used TSMC for CMOS logic chips. But starting this year, Sony switched the production of their CIS chip from their foundary to TSMC (40nm.) The 28nm move is a continuation of their collaboration. Both sides are taking this very serious, with TSMC asking the surrounding factories to move out as quickly as they can.

As for why, the article claims that advances in 5G will lead to more IoT and self-driving cars. These devices will need more CIS to sense their surrounding. Due to this trend the CIS market has grown ~17% year over year. Samsung, Sony's biggest CIS competition and 2nd in market share, is also targeting this particular market. Samsung is rapidly converting some of the DRAM foundaries in Taiwan to CIS production.

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guardiangod

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jasonwatkinspdx  5 years ago

I believe it's not just TSMC. I saw a presentation from one of the ARM architects a couple years back where she said that 28nm would likely stay the most economic node for quite some time to come, as the nodes below that have increasingly expensive mask costs due to multi patterning, or get into very exotic light sources.