Qualcomm and TSMC have jointly announced that Qualcomm's wholly-owned subsidiary, Qualcomm Technologies, will be the first company to produce working silicon on TSMC's 28nm HPM (high performance mobile) process technology. TSMC's 28HPM supports 2GHz + application processors with low power consumption, ideally suited for tablet and high-end smartphone applications.

The first 28HPM production device is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor with quad-core Krait 400 CPUs with speeds of up to 2.3 GHz per core, customized for low power consumption. It also is the first SoC to integrate a 4G LTE Advanced modem with Carrier Aggregation and Category 4 data speeds up to 150 Mbps.

TSMC's 28HPM process also supports wide market applications from application processors, integrated application processors with multimode LTE-Advanced Qualcomm Gobi modems to cloud-computing networking applications. The process could support CPU speeds of 2-2.3GHz with less than 750mW of power consumption per core. Compared to TSMC's 40LP, 28HPM devices are 2.5-2.7X faster, and cut active power in half.