Savior of the fabless, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company aka TSMC has now announced its plans regarding the 28nm production node. Although it hasn't even started mass producing 40nm chips, TSMC stated that 28nm production will kick off in the first in Q1 2010 and that it will see to the debut of the high-k metal gate (HKMG) technology which was previously slated to be introduced with the 32nm node.

28nm will be a full-node process preceded by the 32nm 'shrink' and is expected to be available in two flavors - 28LPT (low power / high performance) and 28HP (high performance), the latter being set to debut in H1 2010 and be used for things like GPUs and CPUs.

"Product differentiation, faster time-to-market and investment optimization are the three most important values TSMC delivers to our customers. In support of these values, we are developing this comprehensive 28nm technology family so that it offers choices, depending on the customer applications and performance requirements. " said Jason Chen, vice president, Worldwide Sales and Marketing, TSMC.

According to TSMC, its 28nm technologies are already supported by alpha version design kits with a CyberShuttle prototyping service set to become available around the end of this year.