Estimated Brisk Tegra 3 Sales to Benefit Taiwan's Contract Suppliers

Taipei, Dec. 21, 2011 (CENS)--Taiwan's contract suppliers in the semiconductor industry, including silicon foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and printed circuit board maker Unimicron Technology Corp., are expected to benefit from brisk sales of Nvidia Tegra 3 microprocessors meant for smartphones or tablets.

Santa Clara, California-headquartered Nvidia Corp. projected Tegra 3 shipments to top 25 million units worldwide in 2012, more than double that of Tegra 2 chips delivered in 2011. Tegra 2's major contract suppliers in Taiwan include TSMC, Unimicron, Siliconware Precision Industries Co., Ltd. and STATS ChipPAC Taiwan Co., Ltd.

Smartphone and tablet heavyweights including Samsung Electronics, HTC Corp., Acer Inc., Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc., Asustek Computer Inc. and LG have reportedly placed orders for the quad-core Tegra 3 processors for their products planned for 2012 releases.

Industry executives pointed out that Tegra 3 is much more popular than Tegra 2 partly because it is built on TSMC 40nm node and partly because it would be the first commercialized ARM quad-core processor and the first to use Nvidia's variable symmetrical multiprocessing (vSMP) technology. The newest processor consumes 61% less energy than Tegra 2 does.

While Tegra 2 has been designed into 23 tablet PC models and 13 smartphone models, Tegra 3 is estimated to enter into more tablet and smarphone models. So far, Nvidia has shipped over 10 million Tegra 2s.

J.H. Huang, Nvidia's co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO), estimated that the room for the growth of the market of smartphones and tablets remains ample although demands for the two handheld computing devices have just started growing at full speed. He based the prediction on releases of new tablet architectures such as Windows coupled with ARM.