By Ashraf Eassa, The Motley Fool
February 16, 2014
Taiwan Semiconductor (NYSE: TSM ) has been rather vocal about the fact that it is now in "high volume manufacturing" of its 20-nanometer SoC process. The 20-nanometer process, according to TSMC, offers a 1.9x improvement in gate-density, 15% performance improvement at the same power or 30% lower power at the same performance compared to the company's 28-nanometer HPM process, and is expected to really begin to ramp in volume during the second half of 2014 and into 2015, as shown below.