If you’re a fabless company, don’t upset TSMC. That was the message from IFS 2012, organized by Future Horizons in London today.
The only one out of the Big Four foundries making money is TSMC, said Mike Bryant, CTO of Future Horizons.
"UMC and SMIC appear to have now given up on advanced nodes, the only way for them now is down," said Bryant, "with Samsung only interested in very high volume products, and Globalfoundries having problems, fabless companies had better not annoy TSMC."
With foundries having to look for investments for 22nm and possibly 450mm, anyone without profits to invest has no future at the leading edge.
As for GloFo, Bryant said: "It’s still having major problems at 32nm and 28nm. The 32nm process is the old IBM/AMD process on SOI and the 28nm is the IBM process on bulk, but both use the fundamentally flawed gate-first process which damages every transistor on the die."
It is said in the industry that GloFo’s 32/28nm yields are measured in wafer per die rather than die per wafer.