Friday, June 14th 2013
UMC joins IBM chip alliance for 10 nm process development
IBM (NYSE: IBM) and United Microelectronics Corporation (NYSE: UMC; TWSE: 2303) ("UMC"), a leading global semiconductor foundry, today announced that UMC will join the IBM Technology Development Alliances as a participant in the group's development of 10nm CMOS process technology.
"Established over a decade ago, the IBM alliance allows the partners to leverage our combined expertise and collaborative research and innovative technology development to address the demanding needs for advanced semiconductor applications," said Gary Patton, VP, IBM Semiconductor Research & Development. "UMC is a strong addition to the alliance."
Po Wen Yen, CEO at UMC, added, "IBM is a recognized leader in fundamental semiconductor technology. We are extremely pleased to work jointly with IBM on advanced fundamentals, and to contribute our many years of experience in developing highly competitive manufacturing technology. Our role as one of the world's top foundries requires us to introduce leading-edge processes in a timely manner to enable next generation customer chip designs. We look forward to collaborating closely with IBM, leveraging their deep technology expertise to shorten our 10nm and FinFET R&D cycles and create a win-win situation for UMC and our customers."
The agreements between UMC and IBM expand upon their 2012 agreements concerning prior nodes, including 14nm FinFET. With IBM's support and know-how from this collaboration, UMC will continue to improve its internally developed 14nm FinFET to offer industry competitive low-power technology enhancements for mobile computing and communication products. The parties plan to develop baseline 10nm process technology to meet the needs of UMC customers. UMC will send an engineering team to join the 10nm development work that will take place in in Albany, New York, while UMC's 14nm FinFET and 10nm implementation will take place at UMC's Tainan, Taiwan R&D site.
"Established over a decade ago, the IBM alliance allows the partners to leverage our combined expertise and collaborative research and innovative technology development to address the demanding needs for advanced semiconductor applications," said Gary Patton, VP, IBM Semiconductor Research & Development. "UMC is a strong addition to the alliance."
The agreements between UMC and IBM expand upon their 2012 agreements concerning prior nodes, including 14nm FinFET. With IBM's support and know-how from this collaboration, UMC will continue to improve its internally developed 14nm FinFET to offer industry competitive low-power technology enhancements for mobile computing and communication products. The parties plan to develop baseline 10nm process technology to meet the needs of UMC customers. UMC will send an engineering team to join the 10nm development work that will take place in in Albany, New York, while UMC's 14nm FinFET and 10nm implementation will take place at UMC's Tainan, Taiwan R&D site.
6 Comments on UMC joins IBM chip alliance for 10 nm process development
If both 10nm process ARM and 14nm Broadwell were to enter the market at relatively the same time they'd likely be competing on the same computation level if Broadwell is an X86 CISC like Haswell, but the ARM chip would dominate out of sheer power efficiency.
If IBM and UMC do their best to get this process to manufacturing/fabrication standard as soon as possible they will have not only dug all the ARM partners out of the hole of being a step behind Intel, but will have clearly taken the lead and put Intel in the worst position.
I'm nervous to see how Intel will react in turn, and specifically how the irrelevancy of their planned roadmap will affect the desktop line.
I think AMD would be wise to let Intel work themselves out of the gaming/enthusiast desktop market and work that niche. Come Broadwell we're going to see BGA soldered chips and the beginning of Intel proprietary motherboards... As well as Broadwell limiting bandwidth lanes to PCIe2x8 as they continue to gut the chipset and work towards increased power efficiency.
In a way, there's no future for PC gaming with Intel unless the enthusiast CPUs post-Haswell-E continue to support chipsets as maybe Intel will move to beastly TDP 8/10+ core architecture anyway. Which is a long shot to call at this point; let alone quite an investment for the average gamer.