China- and Taiwan-based IC design houses including MediaTek, HiSilicon Technologies and Spreadtrum Communications have placed 16nm chip orders with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and begun to step up their pace of orders, according to industry sources.

Apple is another key customer of TSMC's 16nm technology for 2016, the sources indicated. Orders from Apple, and TSMC's other main mobile SoC clients based in China and Taiwan, will fill the foundry's 16nm process capacity in 2016, the sources said.

MediaTek, HiSilicon and Spreadtrum are set to roll out their next-generation mobile SoCs later in 2016. The new chips will all be manufactured by TSMC using the foundry's 16nm FinFET process technology, the sources noted.

The sources also found the growing role of China- and Taiwan-based fabless firms in TSMC's top client list. Among TSMC's top client list for 2016, companies like MediaTek, HiSilicon and Spreadtrum are set to rise outpacing the foundry's traditional major customers like Qualcomm, Nvidia and AMD, the sources said.

MediaTek recently announced the Helio P20 SoC, the latest addition to its top-tier Helio family of mobile processors. The chip is manufactured using 16nm process technology, and is what the company claims the world's first SoC to support LPDDR4X.

Around the same time of MediaTek's announcement, Spreadtrum announced its 64-bit Octa-Core LTE SoC platform, SC9860, entered the mass production stage. SC9860 adopts advanced TSMC 16nm FFC process, according to the China-based firm.

By: DocMemory
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