Asic firms facing ruin by move to 300mm fabsDavid MannersASIC manufacturers will be made uncompetitive by the shift to 300mm wafer fabs, according to Xilinx's chief technical officer, Kris Chellam during a talk at the European Semiconductor Conference in London last week.
"300mm gives us a cost advantage," said Chellam, "it will mean that second and third tier Asic companies will be pushed out of the game."
Asked by EW what he defined as second and third tier Asic companies, Chellam replied: "Anyone below IBM and Lucent."
Wilf Corrigan, founder and CEO of LSI Logic, the next largest Asic manufacturer to IBM and Lucent, responded: "While there's a 20:1 difference in transistor counts between the programmables and Asics it's always going to be more competitive to go with Asics."
Chellam's argument is that Asic companies will find it difficult to justify the expense of 300mm fabs and they will have to use foundries - the same as the programmable companies - which will negate the cost advantages of in-house manufacturing and putting PLD and Asic manufacturing costs on the same footing.
Corrigan reckoned that it is not 300mm wafers but 0.13µm processes that could change the PLD/Asic economic balance. "As you go down to 0.13µm the granularity changes, and the cost of implementing in Asic rises, allowing PLDs to be used in more applications," he said, "it's not 300mm that makes a difference, it's 0.13µm."
LSI Logic recently strengthened its foundry strategy with a process technology and foundry deal with TSMC of Taiwan.
From putting out six to eight per cent of its wafers to foundry at the moment, the company will be putting out 20 per cent by the end of the year and "it could go to 30 per cent and beyond", according to Iain Jackson, LSI's technical marketing director.