SemiSerious

There are more rumors this week about AMD’s manufacturing strategy. Tony Smith of The Register cited a DigiTimes report that AMD will be adding TSMC as a production partner. Fusion processors are scheduled for late 2009. If you think about it, you could say that AMD already has a long-standing relationship with TSMC. After all, ATI was one of the foundry giants biggest customers for years, and this has continued to manufacture GPU’s at TSMC since AMD acquired them almost two years ago. So it’s not a stretch (or such big news) that AMD would consider moving a chunk of its microprocessor production to TSMC as well.

AMD is part of the Common Platform technology consortium that leverages research and development from IBM and volume manufacturing expertise from Chartered. The idea is sound but may require some more time to mature and pay dividends for some of the partners. I have heard that Chartered’s past experience has been centered around the copy exact mentality and running wafers through without trying to improve yields. If a customer such as AMD developed a new process, it was moved into Chartered ‘as is’ on the identical toolset with no continuous process improvement.

The need to maintain an open dialog between the fab and the design team is now broadly accepted including Chartered, and this has prompted their involvement in the Common Platform. On the other hand, TSMC recognized this need much earlier than their foundry competitors (at least in Asia). TSMC has done an outstanding job of closing the loop between design and fabrication often taking the next step of mask editing for layout optimization to improve the yield of its customers designs. TSMC designs, acquires and maintains a large library of IP cores with guaranteed yield in its fabs. Not only can they provide these IP blocks as plug-in modules to customers, but the knowledge they gained developing those cores can help designers to optimize layouts for leading-edge TSMC processes. TSMC has a knack for squeezing out those last few percent of yield.

But what about SOI at TSMC? The SOI processes used by AMD are tightly bound to IBM and its partners. TSMC has worked on SOI in the past, but I’m sure licensing talks related to SOI will be a big part of any move to TSMC-fabbed MPU’s. Or maybe TSMC will convince AMD to transition MPU chips over to bulk silicon (where the GPU’s are now) and cut Chartered, IBM and the Common Platform out completely. Is that what Hector Ruiz means when he says, “our plans are bold?”
 

Share This