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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."
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)