...
I hope this is no information you got from KnC because it can't be correct.
Some semiconductor industry facts:
1) at the moment there is no 28nm fab at all in People's Rep. of China (they are of course working at building ten )
2) TSMC stands for "Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company", all there fabs including 28nm are in Taiwan
3) The only 28nm GLOBALFOUNDRIES fab (former AMD production side) is fab1 located in Dresden, Germany
Sorry, yes, my bad about GF, although Taiwan is a long disputed province of the People's Republic of China.
I clearly remember someone posting a wild guess about what will be the KnC fab. it costs me quite a few to find it but eventuallly I got it:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.2584946
it was buried into the 'orama openday report thread. it should be helpful hopefully
I think you dug up the packaging company, not the fab.
yep, you're probably right.
I don't know why but I've taken for granted that they would ASE Inc facility to produce the chip.
That's marketing: they're a "leader", "full featured", "turnkey solutions" and whatnot THEN you realize they do not actually fabricate the silicon.
I think they'll be using Altera (who's using TSMC) for the fab. They were working on a special deal for the Mars, using Altera FPGA, and Altera can turn their FPGA code (RTL? forgot the exact TLA) into an ASIC.
Please don't mind me, but all companies offering RTL2GDS (standard cell ASIC synthesis and place&route) or FPGA-hardcopy/structured ASIC implementations are in this case just service providers, no foundries with fabs.
There is only a handful "pure play" foundries offering advanced nodes (< 65nm) in principle open for every customer. There are only 2 currently offering 28nm their own fabs: TSMC and GLOBALFOUNDRIES.
All other 28nm (and below) players (like Intel, Samsung, IBM, STM) are so called IDMs, offering their production capacity to some interessting high volume customers from time to time too to get a better workload in their fabs.
Yeah, I did not mean Altera is a fab. They were probably just trying to decide between Altera and eASIC (unless you know of a 3rd company they have a contract with for 28nm?).