AMD to sign deal with Asian foundry

AMD to sign deal with Asian foundry
AUSTIN, Texas — Hector Ruiz, chief operating officer at Advanced Micro Devices Inc., said he expects to announce soon an agreement with an unnamed Asian foundry that will allow AMD to "take our sweet spot and fine-tune it for the foundry market."

Even as it moves to take advantage of what Ruiz called the "phenomenal levels of investment" by Asian foundries, AMD will ramp its 130-nanometer (0.13-micron) silicon-on-insulator process at its Dresden, Germany, fabrication facility for production of a 64-bit processor, code-named Hammer, that will supplant the Athlon product family.

In keeping its SOI-based process within AMD's own fabs, at least for the foreseeable future, and moving a portion of its bulk CMOS capacity to a foundry, AMD would be adopting a strategy similar to that of IBM Corp.'s Microelectronics Division. IBM, United Microelectronics Corp. and Infineon Technologies have co-developed a bulk CMOS process at 130-nm design rules that is in production now.

After testing out the SOI process on SRAMs last year, AMD expects to see first evaluation silicon on the Hammer soon. Production-level quantities are expected by the end of the year, Ruiz said.

Speaking with securities analysts on a conference call Wednesday (Jan. 16), AMD chairman and chief executive officer W.J. Sanders III said the Hammer processor has a die size of 103 square millimeters on the 130-nm SOI process, which compares favorably with a 129-mm² die size for some of the Athlon products now shipping. They compete with Intel Corp.'s Pentium 4.

"When we get to Hammer, we will have a massive, massive competitive advantage over Intel," Sanders said. "The year 2003 is our breakaway year, and I think you've already seen the best of what Intel can do."

Ruiz said AMD expects to ship 40 million to 50 million processors in 2003. Though the former Motorola Inc. executive did not identify the potential Asian foundry partner the company will tap to meet that unit demand, Semiconductor Business News, an online sister publication to EE Times, reported that UMC (Hsinchu, Taiwan) is rumored to be in discussions with AMD now.

All of AMD's Athlon XPs, its highest-performing processors, are made at the Dresden facility. Sanders said AMD made 4 million Athlon XPs there in the fourth quarter of last year, and that number will increase this quarter. AMD spent $161 million to further equip the Dresden fab in the fourth quarter, more than half of its total capital investment for the quarter. For this year, AMD expects to boost its capital investment budget by about 20 percent, to $850 million, as the company converts Dresden completely from 180-nm to 130-nm design rules by the fourth quarter.