See: AMD foundry spin-out to see $6bn investment from Abu Dhabi
The industry is awash with rumours this morning: AMD is to announce a plan to spin-off its semiconductor wafer fabs into an independent foundry business.
The other rumour is that Toshiba may be considering a takeover bid for memory chip company Spansion. Although this has since been denied by the Japanese chipmaker.
More weight is being put on AMD’s plans to divest its wafer fabs, a move which would effectively turn it fabless in its head-to-head microprocessor battle with Intel, the world’s largest semiconductor maker.
It is known that AMD has been drawing up plans for whartr it called an "asset-smart" manufacturing strategy over that last few months.
Reports suggest that the Abu Dhabi government will invest $2.1bn in the foundry business. AMD has two fabs in Germany as well as in the US.
An announcement from AMD is scheduled for later today.
A Toshiba bid for Spansion would be an interesting move. Toshiba is known to be chasing Samsung in its desire to become the No.1 NAND memory chip supplier.
Spansion is a big supplier of NOR flash, a product for which it has a 37% market share. But Spansion is believed to have plans to enter the larger NAND flash market with a new product it calls ORNAND2.
Toshiba is also facing the prospect of NAND rival Samsung making a takeover bid for SanDisk, a long-time NAND memory partners.
See also: Electronics Weekly's focus on x86 microprocessors, a roundup of content related to x86 microprocessor technologies and developments.