The global IC foundry market is forecast to increase 12% in 2015, outpacing the overall semiconductor sector's 5% growth, said TSMC's co-CEO Mark Liu at the company's 14th annual Supply Chain Management forum held December 4.
TSMC is confident that it will continue to outperform the global IC foundry market in 2015, Liu indicated.
For 2014, TSMC has predicted the global IC foundry market will log a 14% increase while the overall semiconductor market is set to grow by a smaller 9%.
TSMC's revenue growth for 2014 is set to increase 27%, Liu disclosed. For the first three quarters of 2014, the foundry reported NT$540.285 billion (US$17.35 billion) in consolidated sales, up 19.7% a year earlier.
TSMC is on pace to generate record consolidated sales of between NT$217 billion and NT$220 billion in the fourth quarter of 2014, Liu noted.
In addition, Liu revealed that TSMC is scheduled to move its 16nm FinFET process to volume production in mid-2015. The process will see 11 customer designs taped out by the end of 2014, and nearly 60 designs are scheduled to tape out by year-end 2015, Liu said.
TSMC's 16nm node technology will be widely adopted in the production of handset baseband chips, application processors, consumer SoCs, graphics processors and CPUs, Liu added.
As for TSMC's 10nm process technology, trial production is scheduled to kick off by the end of 2015 and enter volume production in 2016, according to Liu.
TSMC will outperform the worldwide IC foundry market in 2015, says company co-CEO Liu
Photo: Michael Lee, Digitimes, December 2014
Article translated by Jessie Shen
