Posted on Wednesday, April 25 2012 @ 14:09 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Intel senior fellow of technology and manufacturing Mark Bohr claims TSMC's recent announcement that it will offer just one 20nm process is the beginning of the end of the fabless chip model:
Bohr claims TSMC’s recent announcement it will serve just one flavor of 20 nm process technology is an admission of failure. The Taiwan fab giant apparently cannot make at its next major node the kind of 3-D transistors needed mitigate leakage current, Bohr said.
“Qualcomm won’t be able to use that [20 nm] process,” Bohr told me in an impromptu discussion at yesterday’s press event where Intel announced its Ivy Bridge CPUs made in its tri-gate 22 nm process. “The foundry model is collapsing,” he told me.
Of course Intel would like the world to believe that only it can create the complex semiconductor technology the world needs. Not TSMC that serves competitors like Qualcomm or GlobalFoundries that makes chips for Intel’s archrival AMD.
Full details
at EE Times.
