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In the wake of AMD'south decision to have its 7nm business to TSMC, GlobalFoundries has announced some radical restructuring plans of its own. The visitor is killing its 7nm deployment and retrenching around both 12/14nm and its investments in product offerings similar FDX. Co-ordinate to GF'due south press release, this major change in direction took place later on Thomas Caulfield assumed the CEO position earlier this twelvemonth.

This is a pregnant departure from GF'south previous statements on the topic and its own manufacturing plans. The company is as well spinning off its ASIC business equally a wholly-endemic subsidiary that will operate independently of the foundry business organization. GF writes:

In addition, to improve leverage GF'due south stiff heritage and meaning investments in ASIC design and IP, the company is establishing its ASIC business as a wholly-owned subsidiary, independent from the foundry business. A relevant ASIC business requires continued access to leading-border technology. This independent ASIC entity will provide clients with access to alternative foundry options at 7nm and beyond, while assuasive the ASIC business to engage with a broader set of clients, specially the growing number of systems companies that need ASIC capabilities and more than manufacturing calibration than GF can provide alone.

I'll admit to a lack of knowledge when it comes to the specifics of how ASIC design teams work with foundries, but announcing that you're spinning off a business organisation unit dedicated to helping your existing and hereafter customers leverage the pattern capabilities of other foundries doesn't seem similar a positive announcement. GF refers to providing clients with access to alternative foundries, implying that this service is primarily being provided to one or more than customers that intended to use its 7nm node and at present won't be able to. But fifty-fifty if that's the case, you'd recall this kind of offer would exist limited to the impacted customers and not spun off as its own business. At the aforementioned time, keeping the unit of measurement as a wholly-owned subsidiary encourages customers to recall of it every bit an extension of GF as opposed to a completely divide business concern — and that's just weird when you consider that one of the most logical purposes of a foundry's wholly-owned subsidiary would be to funnel business organization to that foundry.

We reached out to GlobalFoundries for additional comment. The company told us: "The value of the ASIC business is in the IP and pattern services information technology offers to customers. The new ASIC subsidiary volition still be offer IP and design platforms on GF's 14nm and above technologies, and we expect they volition create ASIC offerings in more avant-garde technologies with other engineering science and manufacturing partners."

And Then There Were Three

Always since the 28nm node transition, there accept been four foundries on the leading edge — Samsung, TSMC, GlobalFoundries, and Intel. GF has struggled the most with its identify as a leading-edge fab, but the company appeared to exist righting itself. Its 14nm may have been licensed from Samsung, just GF still had to implement the node in its own factories. The success of AMD'south Ryzen and Polaris GPU families is evidence that the foundry was able to reach acceptable yields and then meliorate its ain process enough to evangelize pregnant generational improvements to AMD's second-generation Ryzen CPUs.

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But with today's annunciation, that'southward (by and large) over. Y'all can, I think, brand a valid argument that FD-SOI and the 22FDX and 12FDX deployments are a dissimilar type of technology, and i where GF is leading, merely it'south besides leading by virtue of being the just player on the field. And and then far, the applications are fairly niche. As a private company, GlobalFoundries is not required to brand public quarterly statements, merely the company recently appear that information technology had more than $2B in pattern revenue with FD-SOI. For comparison, TSMC'southward yearly acquirement for 2022 was over $32B. None of this is to imply that GlobalFoundries work on 22FDX or 12FDX (which isn't ready yet) is meaningless — in fact, given projections for IoT sales, the foundry'due south early position in FD-SOI could exist quite lucrative in the time to come — only it's not a drop-in replacement for the kind of acquirement TSMC and Samsung have earned on FinFETs.

That'south probably why GF is making this announcement now, while AMD's sales of 14 and 12nm products are nonetheless robust, and the visitor has time to wind down its 7nm investment and presumably make up one's mind what else to do with its foundry space that was previously dedicated to the ramp. Afterwards nine years of trying to compete confronting the entrenched players of the industry, GF has decided to chart its ain course and focus on alternatives.

1552px-ibm_power9-11_roadmap

It's non clear what this means for IBM's Power roadmap, just presumably any future POWER10 and POWER11 CPUs will exist built at either Samsung or TMSC. Given that GlobalFoundries bought IBM'southward entire foundry business and had pledged to continue working with the visitor, this twist undoubtedly impacts IBM as well. It's entirely possible that IBM is 1 of the clients that GF's new ASIC business unit of measurement will be profitable in porting its projects to another foundry.

Now Read: AMD Moves All 7nm Production to TSMC, Samsung Wants to Atomic number 82 the Foundry Business organisation to 4nm and Beyond, and Smaller Isn't E'er Better