Globalfoundries pledges commitment to Dresden location

Globalfoundries, AMD's former manufacturing division, has promised stability for its Dresden fabs as well as for the existing R&D units in that region. In a presentation for the press, CEO Doug Grose unveiled a roadmap for the company's planned activities. Grose said manufacturing capacities will be expanded to 50,000 wafer starts per month over the next two years, with the capacity equally divided over the SOI and bulk semiconductor production lines, although there will be a high degree of flexibility.

Module 1 of Globalfoundries' Fab 1 currently produces 45nm SOI processors, while module 2 is ramping up for the production of 32nm bulk semiconductors by the end of the year.

Globalfoundries, the manufacturing joint venture of microprocessor vendor AMD and Abu Dhabi based Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC) with its production site in Dresden (Germany), will expand its current manufacturing capacities to 50.000 wafer starts per month over the next two years, said Grose. The capacity will be equally divided over two production lines for SOI and bulk semiconductors respectively, but since many process steps are identical, there will be a high degree of flexibility, explained Jim Doran, General manager of the Dresden facilities.

While the company which targets at high-volume leading-edge foundry customers obviously will compete with most Asian foundry service providers, it will not follow TSMCs example and offer design services for its customers, Grose said. "Not in the strict sense of design services, but we will support our customers in getting their designs into silicon as far as possible", Grose said. For this reason, a Dresden-based AMD chip design team will change over to Globalfoundries.