In response to changing industry dynamics, AMD announced in October 2008 a new strategy to focus exclusively on the design phase of semiconductor product development. To achieve that strategy, AMD partnered with Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC) of Abu Dhabi to create a new joint venture company designed to become… Read More
GlobalFoundries Fab 8: Jobs
GlobalFoundries was created by spinning out the manufacturing side of AMD’s semiconductor business. Initially the company was jointly owned by AMD and by the Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC) which is an investment arm of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. A couple of years ago ATIC bought out the remaining share from… Read More
Wanna Build a Bitcoin Miner: GlobalFoundries Will Manufacture it For You
You may know a bit about Bitcoin, the digital currency. One part of the system is “mining” new bitcoins, analogous to mining new gold when we were on the gold standard, creating “money” out of thin air but at a cost of doing the actual mining.
Here is an interesting aside. When I lived in France the father of… Read More
Technology Challenges: Intel, IBM, Xilinx, GlobalFoundries, IMEC
I spent the day at the SEMI Industry Strategy Symposium in Half Moon Bay. The early part of the day was devoted to technology challenges. Obviously everyone did not say exactly the same things, and had a little bit of a different spin depending on what business they are in. But there was a lot of commonality between Intel, IBM, Xilinx… Read More
GlobalFoundries Has a New CEO
Sanjay Jha is taking over as CEO of GlobalFoundries. His background is in mobile. He was at Qualcomm in the early part of his career and was COO from 2006 to 2008 before going to be co-CEO of Motorola and then, when the company was split, CEO of Motorola Mobility. That was acquired by Google and he stepped down after the acquisition closed.… Read More
The Leading Edge Depends on What You Are Doing
At Semicon Japan a few days ago, Subi Kengeri of GlobalFoundries delivered the keynote. While he covered a number of topics, using Tokyo’s recent win of the 2020 Olympics as a hook, one major theme was the increasing importance of processes other than the bleeding edge digital processes that get all the news.
What is leading… Read More
GlobalFoundries and ARM
GlobalFoundries had several interesting things at the ARM TechCon last week. Firstly, GlobalFoundries won the best in show award in the chip design category recognizing the best-in-class technologies introduced since the last TechCon.
Earlier in the summer GlobalFoundries and ARM announced the ARM Cortex-A12 processor,… Read More
GlobalFoundries Expands in Singapore
GlobalFoundries has been in Singapore for a long time. Longer than GlobalFoundries has existed in fact. Chartered Semiconductor was started in Singapore in 1987 and GF acquired them in early 2010 less than a year after they were created by spinning out the manufacturing arm of AMD. When GF was started their state of the art fab was… Read More
Foundry 2.0: Why It Is Different And Why You Should Care
If you have been to an Ajit Manocha keynote recently, he talks a lot about Foundry 2.0. I covered his keynote at Semicon West in July here. Dan Hutcheson of VLSI Research interviewed Ajit about this new business model to identify it, see how it was different and see how GlobalFoundries were executing the model differently from the … Read More
Intel 14nm Delayed?
One of the more interesting pieces of information I overheard at SEMICON West earlier this month was that Intel 14nm was delayed. This rumor came from the semiconductor equipment manufacturers and they would know. What I was told is that the Intel 14nm process has not left the OR development facility to be replicated in the OR and … Read More
More Headwinds – CHIPS Act Chop? – Chip Equip Re-Shore? Orders Canceled & Fab Delay