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.

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