Globalfoundries will announce a further expansion to its advanced manufacturing capabilities in the next few weeks which will make its capacity on advanced technology nodes comparable with the capacity of TSMC, according to Mojy Chian, Globalfoundries’ senior vice president for device enablement, speaking at the International Electronics Forum 2010 in Dresden this morning.
"If you look at the planned capacity for advanced technology, and the new fab ramping to 42,000 wafers a month, and with the fab in Singapore going to 50,000 wafers per month, and the Dresden fab going to 60,000 wafers a month, and then in the next few weeks we will announce a further expansion of our facilities and, when you see the further expansion, you will see the numbers are very comparable with TSMC."
Asked by EW how Globalfoundries could compete against TSMC on cost when TSMC has just announced it will build its third 100,000 wafer a month fab, and all Globalfoundries’ fabs are considerably smaller, Chian replied: "In the advanced technology side, cost is not the only factor. You are all aware of the issues at 40nm. The early adopters at 40nm had issues which were independent of cost. They couldn’t get wafers, no matter what the cost."
"Cost is one factor in the advanced technology business", added Chian, "but the most important part is how quickly a foundry can go to high volume production. We have shown that we can go to high volume very quickly, and we plan to reproduce that at the 32nm node."