AMD has officially announced its plans for the move to 32nm scheduled for late next year.
These involve expanding and investing in the Dresden facilities, says EETimes Europe.
At a Munich conference, Udo Nothelfer, corporate vp in charge of wafer ops at Fab 36, started laying the foundation for the business unit he will be heading under ATIC administration.
According to Nothelfer, Fab 38 and Fab 36 (formerly known as Fab 30), will become property of The Foundry Company come January 2009, and when wafer production has fully scaled, together they will churn out 50,000 wafers amonth – which is quite impressive. ATI graphics chips will also be built in Dresden, but these will come end of 2009, when the company begins the transition to 32nm. In order to do this, Dresden is buying 32nm bulk production tech to add to its 45nm SOI sauce and future 32nm SOI, says EETimes.
You might think 12 months is a short stint for a node (45nm in this case) but if AMD is to get back in the game, it needs to have those 32nm ready by late 2009. Until then, AMD will be all about sweating out the economic climate and leveraging those sweet low-power CPUs.
It seems 32nm is taking the utmost importance down at AMD HQ as it's the first opportunity the company has to get on a level playing field with its rivals. Intel is planning to intro 32nm Nehalem shrinks (Tick) by late 2009 and the 32nm Sandy Bridge processors (Tocks) – developed in Israel, further down the road, while Nvidia will depend on TSMC to achieve this.
In fact, with TFC's Dresden building both CPUs and GPUs, it’ll be biting deep in to Far Eastern foundries’ revenues – the same foundries that are manufacturing 55nm GPUs and future 40nm GPUs. We’ve mailed a couple of ATI’s partners about this and we’ll update as the replies arrive.
TSMC, for one, has announced 32nm high-k dielectric manufacturing for Q4 2009, which puts it ahead of the pack and is the most likely source for AMD/ATIC/TFC’s tech purchase.
EETimes