Phase two
GlobalFoundries, the semiconductor manufacturing company spun-off from AMD earlier this year, has announced it has broken ground on the production of a new manufacturing facility in upstate New York, to be called Fab 2.
Fab 1 is the name given to the former AMD facility in Dresden Germany, through which GlobalFoundries now manufactures all AMD's CPUs on an out-sourced basis. Fab 2 will be designed to manufacture future generations of silicon, including those used in graphics and embedded applications as well as CPUs. It's expected to start volume production by 2012.
"Semiconductors are the building blocks of technology innovation and are present in everything from mobile phones to kitchen appliances and solar panels," said Hector Ruiz, chairman of GlobalFoundries.
Doug Grose, CEO of GlobalFoundries, added: "With the development of Fab 2, we'll take the first steps in realizing our vision to harness resources and talent on a worldwide basis to enable our customer's product innovation to come to market faster and on the most advanced technology platforms."
It's telling that Ruiz chose to focus on semiconductor applications outside of the PC. For GlobalFoundries to succeed it needs to acquire a whole lot more customers than just AMD. Its biggest competitor - TSMC - derives most of its business from the mobile phone and embedded sectors and it's here that we suspect GlobalFoundries will be pitching the hardest.
Here's an artist's impression of what it will end up looking like.
