Nvidia Blames TSMC’s 28nm Process Technology for Slow Sales.

Yields of semiconductors made using 28nm fabrication process at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company seem to be improving, but their under-supplies are becoming more evident.

On Friday Nvidia said that the problems with the supply of 28nm chips at TSMC persisted throughout the 2013 Q1, even thought the company’s better than expected margins showed that the costs are getting down, which is an indicator of improving yields for their latest products, but the firm does not expect these issues to get resolved any time soon.

Chris Evenden, Director of Investor Relations at Nvidia said “Demand is high for Kepler and although supply will continue to improve, we are not able to meet all our OEM and channel demand in Q2 FY2013. We do not expect the 28nm supply situation to resolve itself until later this year,” during quarterly conference call with financial analysts.

For the Q1 FY2013 that ended on April, 29, 2012, Nvidia reported revenue of $924.9 million, net income of $60.4 and gross margin of 50.1%. The results were generally better than expected by many, primarily thanks to shipments increase of Tegra 3 system-on-chip.

Nvidia’s operating expenses (to which the company usually attributes GPU/GPGPU implementation costs) were even higher than projected by around $7 million at $390.5 million. Nonetheless, the firm’s gross margins was 50.1%, higher than predicted 49.2%. This happened primarily because of sound launches of the GeForce 6-series GTX “Kepler” products that are now sold in price ranges between $399 and $999.

Due to seasonally weak calendar first quarter, sales of Nvidia were down across both consumer and professional lines.

Source: XBitLabs