Tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs at risk as TSMC manufacturing fault fells production

An incident at one of TSMC’s manufacturing facilities has reportedly ruined tens of thousands of 16/12nm wafers… y’know all those slices of silicon from which spawn Nvidia’s entire current lineup of graphics cards. The problem is down to imported chemicals used in the production process not being as pure as is needed, resulting in contaminated wafers which are then unusable. This isn’t the first time the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (if you’re not into the whole brevity thing) has experienced some brutal manufacturing problems. Last year a ‘misoperation during the installation process for a new tool’ caused a virus to spread around a number of its fabs, which itself resulted in the scrapping of thousands of wafers. That halt in production cost the company around $85m, but TSMC has yet to release an estimate about what this latest incident is going to do to its bottom line. But, given that the 16/12nm production node is one of its most popular - with the likes of Nvidia, HiSilicon, and MediaTek contracting the company to make their chips - the manufacturing losses could be far worse this time around.

from PCGamesN http://bit.ly/2UnsJ2m