The Foundry Company

Earlier this year, AMD used its manufacturing assets along with investments from Mubadala ATIC (Advanced Technology Investment Company) to give rise to a new foundry company. Its formation renders AMD fabless, though the resulting company assures preferential treatment to AMD as its number one customer, and its only customer before it could accept designs from other firms. The company has already set targets for expansion of its manufacturing facilities, to cater to the latest foundry processes. While the company has already achieved 45nm SOI manufacturing, and is into mass production of AMD's processors, it's already set tentative time-frames in which to advance to the 32nm process, along with embracing the High-K metal gate transistor technology. The company is out with roadmaps for its plans.



Another key goal for AMD (the chip company) would be to nucleate manufacturing into the foundry company's facilities, namely FAB 38 in Dresden, Germany and FAB 4x (x = undecided, depends on the year it is launched), its upcoming facility in New York, United States. Although CPU fabrication and packaging is done in AMD-owned facilities, bulk manufacture of GPUs, and core-logic chips (chipset) is outsourced to companies such as TSMC and UMC. AMD plans to bring back manufacturing to the facilities of the foundry company. It is expected to be a slow but definite transition: