“Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) will use its 8-inch processing, instead of 12-inch, to produce fingerprint sensors for Apple’s next-generation iPhone due to concerns about yield rates for 12-inch wafer-level packaging (WLP), according to industry sources,” Josephine Lien, Mavis Hong, and Jessie Shen report for DigiTimes.
“Apple previously decided to have TSMC produce fingerprint sensors for its next-generation iPhone at the foundry’s 12-inch facilities using a 65nm process, the sources noted,” Lien, Hong, and Shen report. “However, acknowledging risks associated with 12-inch WLP technologies, Apple has finally chosen TSMC’s 8-inch processing which enables mature yield rates for WLP to produce the fingerprint sensors, the sources said.”
“Yield rates for 8-inch WLP are able to exceed 95%, while those for 12-inch WLP at TSMC’s facilities at the Southern Taiwan Science Park (STSP) stay between 70% and 80%, the sources revealed,” Lien, Hong, and Shen report. “Fingerprint sensors for Apple’s iPhone 5s have been manufactured at TSMC’s 8-inch fabs.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
If even 8 isn’t enough these days, I’m in real trouble.
Ah yes, i remember when 6″ was king….
i felt big then
I thought they were STAYING with the 8 inch process. They tried out the 12 but the yields were not good enough to switch to it… 😎
They didn’t shift to an 8″ boulle. There were discussions between TSMC and Apple about going to 12″ for the sake of cost, but that never materialized because of the difficulty of moving to the new process. It will happen eventually, but it hadn’t happened yet.