GlobalFoundries has officially integrated operations with Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing and started functioning as one company under the GlobalFoundries brand.
The integrated GlobalFoundries is hailing itself as the first full-service semiconductor foundry with a global manufacturing and technology footprint across Asia, Europe, and the US.
With 2009 revenues for GlobalFoundries and Chartered in excess of $2bn and more than 150 pooled customers, the company said it has plans to deepen existing relationships and to aggressively pursue new customers.
“Chartered and GlobalFoundries combined would take the No. 2 status in the foundry space with the second largest market share of around 26% only after TSMC, which has around 29% share based on planned 300-mm capacity,” commented Tim Luke, a semiconductor market analyst at Barclays Capital.
“We highlight that Chartered has a broad customer base including marquee names such as Broadcom, Qualcomm, Marvell, Microsoft (for its X-Box 360 game console), and IBM providing the combined entity a customer list of over 150 customers,” said Luke.
Just last week, GlobalFoundries announced it would work with Qualcomm on 45nm low power and 28nm low power technologies with an intended collaboration on future advanced process nodes. In October 2009, the manufacturing spinoff of AMD announced a partnership with ARM on 28-nm HKMG for the Cortex-A9.
And prior to that, GlobalFoundries made headlines when it announced STMicroelectronics as a 40nm low-power bulk silicon customer.
Today’s integration had been widely expected since the closure of the Chartered acquisition on December 18, 2009, by Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC). With investment from ATIC, AMD in October 2008 officially announced plans to spin off its manufacturing operations and form GlobalFoundries.
Broken out, the new GlobalFoundries currently has five 200-mm fabs and one 300-mm fab in Singapore, as well as one 300-mm fab complex in Dresden, Germany. The company’s capacity build-out plan includes expansion of Fab 1 in Dresden and Fab 7 in Singapore, as well as construction of a long-time-coming 300-mm facility in New York, for which plans began while GlobalFoundries was still the manufacturing operations of AMD.
GlobalFoundries reported that the New York facility is on track to begin ramping initial production in 2012.
All in all, the combined GlobalFoundries’ capacity is expected to expand to 1.6 million 300-mm wafers annually by 2014. This will be supplemented by 2.2 million 200-mm wafers annually, the integrated GlobalFoundries said.
Story published in EDN