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New IBM Plant Will Mass Produce .1 Micron Chips
Ruger writes "AP News is carrying this story about IBM opening a new plant in upstate New York. What's most interesting about the story is that IBM will be producing .1 Micron Chips rather than the usual .25 or .18 produced by Intel and other chip makers, or .13 Micron chips they currently make for their PowerPC chips."
Isn't the northwood P4 produced at .13 micron? And the AMD Throughbred is also at .13? The header says that other chip manufacturers produce chips at .25 or .18 when this simply isn't true.
IBM does not make G4s. They don't have a license for Altivec. They already make quite speedy G3s, but you don't see them in consumer products that are marketed based on Mhz.
Hah, competitors hardly need to "catch up." Seimconductor companies almost never want to be the first to build a fab supporting the largest wafer size, unless your design a chip that no one is buying and have to dedicate 420+ mm2 per die just to get decent performance. ;) Being first sounds good on paper, but it also means you get to debug all of the new tools from vendors. If you thought beta software builds were costly, try running your expensive wafers though a $4M+ Endura from Applied Materials and having the robot shatter them. Not only have you lost your test vehicles, you wasted expensive chemicals and have to clean up the vacuum chamber. Not fun or cheap by any means.
The running joke in the biz is that every company wants to be in second place in the race.
Just for the record, I work at IBM in East Fishkill, NY (but not in Chip manufacturing.) I do NOT speak for IBM.
IBM has been in East Fishkill since the early 60s, manufacturing chips and packaging (MCMs, etc.) for mainframes. IBM employs over 10,000 people in Poughkeepsie (10 miles away) and East Fishkill. The "New" plant is a new chip fabrication line in an old building (building 323) that used to be used to make bipolar chips for mainframes. They have been working on this new plant for over two years, and it is already producing sample chips. Normal production is scheduled to begin in the fourth quarter (btw, the current production from this plant is 0.13 micron, but in the future, it will move to sub 0.1 micron processes.)
IBM is using this plant as a high-end foundry. In other words, customers will design high performance chips that will be manufactured here. They are already working with some high-volume customers (Nintendo, Sony, etc.) Customers will also include IBM chip designers (mostly IBM servers.)
Oh, and on the whole upstate, downstate issue: People who live in upstate New York consider us downstate. People who live in downstate New York consider us upstate.
And, as Gov. Pataki said yesterday, the Hudson Valley is much nicer than Silicon Valley. We have trees.