It appears that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has received a very serious order from Apple. They’re going to manufacture exclusively their Apple A10 processor, that’s meant for the iPhone 7, according to Digitimes, quoting Commercial Times.
The volume production of the A10 chipset begins in March 2016 and the CPUs will be available on the next gen iPhone, debuting in Q3 or Q4 2016. TSMC is already working on the Apple A9 chipset, obtaining half of its orders, all going to the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus. TSMC will be relying for the upcoming chop on its backend integrated fan-out (InFO) wafer level packaging.
They will also be using the 16 nm FinFET process technology. We can’t help but wonder where this leaves Samsung, traditionally a partner of Apple’s when it comes to chipset development. Well, at least they’re still making the RAM and storage, as far as I know, right? TSMC refused to comment on this contract for now.
via Digitimes
