The 45nm process node will be a watershed for the semiconductor industry as the last process which is truly multi-sourced. After 45nm, the world's five major process development camps will control the development of, and access to, basic semiconductor process technology.
When the 32nm process comes along, it will have derived from only five, or maybe four, sources, and the number of non-foundry, non-memory, semiconductor companies able to afford their own manufacturing facilities will be numbered on the fingers of one hand.
STMicroelectronics, Freescale Semiconductor, NXP Semiconductor and Texas Instruments have all declared that they will terminate basic R&D with the 45nm generation.
For ST, Freescale and NXP that work is drawing to a close at Crolles II, which will now confine itself to producing derivatives of a basic CMOS process which will be developed by IBM.
IBM has got a cluster of Samsung, Chartered Semiconductor, ST, Freescale and Infineon Technologies which will all use the IBM process developed at East Fishkill.
The other camps in the world continuing with process development are the IMEC camp in Leuven, to which most of the world's semiconductor company's are attached, TSMC in Taiwan and, in Japan, the Renesas-Matsushita nexus, and the Toshiba-NEC-Fujitsu collaboration.
But with 45nm looking like the last generation at which most of these players will have their own manufacturing facility, most of these companies will be modifying their R&D contracts to concentrate on design technology development, rather than process technology, just as Sony has recently done with its technical co-operation with Toshiba and IBM.
There is little more than a couple of years to go before the semiconductor industry changes its structure for ever.
In 2010, 32nm is expected to move into volume production and, apart from the memory manufacturers and the foundries, who will have a leading-edge fab?
Intel, IBM and Matsushita, certainly, AMD and Renesas, maybe. And that's about it.
See also: The Mannerisms blog, with chip industry musings from David Manners