Globalfoundries Reportedly Asks EU to Probe TSMC

Release time：2017-09-22
author：Ameya360
source：EE Times
reading：1431

　　Globalfoundries has asked European regulators to investigate rival chip foundry TSMC,accusing its larger competitor of unfair competition,according to a report by the Reuters news service.

　　Globalfoundries(Milpitas,Calif.)has claimed to the EU's legislative and regulatory arm,the European Commission,that TSMC unfairly uses loyalty rebates,exclusivity clauses and bundled rebates as well as penalties to discourage customers from switching to rivals,according to the report,which cites an anonymous semiconductor industry source.

　　A spokesman for Globalfoundries said the company is not surprised to learn that the European Commission is investigating allegedly anti-competitive behavior by TSMC,which has"a virtual lock"on supply.

　　"It's prudent for the regulator to monitor behaviors more closely and Globalfoundries will naturally support regulatory agencies as they take a closer look at this key industrial sector for Europe and the world,"the spokesman said in an emailed statement.

　　TSMC did not immediately respond to a request for comment by EE Times.

　　TSMC is far and away the market leader in the pure play foundry space,with 2016 market share of 59 percent,according to market research firm IC Insights.Globalfoundries is the No.2 player in the market,with 2016 share of 11 percent,according to research firm.

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GlobalFoundries reshapes technology portfolio
Trade news

GlobalFoundries reshapes technology portfolio

GLOBALFOUNDRIES today announced an important step in its transformation, continuing the trajectory launched with the appointment of Tom Caulfield as CEO earlier this year. In line with the strategic direction Caulfield has articulated, GF is reshaping its technology portfolio to intensify its focus on delivering truly differentiated offerings for clients in high-growth markets.GF is realigning its leading-edge FinFET roadmap to serve the next wave of clients that will adopt the technology in the coming years. The company will shift development resources to make its 14/12nm FinFET platform more relevant to these clients, delivering a range of innovative IP and features including RF, embedded memory, low power and more. To support this transition, GF is putting its 7nm FinFET program on hold indefinitely and restructuring its research and development teams to support its enhanced portfolio initiatives. This will require a workforce reduction, however a significant number of top technologists will be redeployed on 14/12nm FinFET derivatives and other differentiated offerings.“Demand for semiconductors has never been higher, and clients are asking us to play an ever-increasing role in enabling tomorrow’s technology innovations,” Caulfield said. “The vast majority of today’s fabless customers are looking to get more value out of each technology generation to leverage the substantial investments required to design into each technology node. Essentially, these nodes are transitioning to design platforms serving multiple waves of applications, giving each node greater longevity. This industry dynamic has resulted in fewer fabless clients designing into the outer limits of Moore’s Law. We are shifting our resources and focus by doubling down on our investments in differentiated technologies across our entire portfolio that are most relevant to our clients in growing market segments.”In addition, to better leverage GF’s strong heritage and significant investments in ASIC design and IP, the company is establishing its ASIC business as a wholly-owned subsidiary, independent from the foundry business. A relevant ASIC business requires continued access to leading-edge technology. This independent ASIC entity will provide clients with access to alternative foundry options at 7nm and beyond, while allowing the ASIC business to engage with a broader set of clients, especially the growing number of systems companies that need ASIC capabilities and more manufacturing scale than GF can provide alone.GF is intensifying investment in areas where it has clear differentiation and adds true value for clients, with an emphasis on delivering feature-rich offerings across its portfolio. This includes continued focus on its FDXTM platform, leading RF offerings (including RF SOI and high-performance SiGe), analog/mixed signal, and other technologies designed for a growing number of applications that require low power, real-time connectivity, and on-board intelligence. GF is uniquely positioned to serve this burgeoning market for “connected intelligence,” with strong demand in new areas such as autonomous driving, IoT and the global transition to 5G.“Lifting the burden of investing at the leading edge will allow GF to make more targeted investments in technologies that really matter to the majority of chip designers in fast-growing markets such as RF, IoT, 5G, industrial and automotive,” said Samuel Wang, research vice president at Gartner. “While the leading edge gets most of the headlines, fewer customers can afford the transition to 7nm and finer geometries.  14nm and above technologies will continue to be the important demand driver for the foundry business for many years to come. There is significant room for innovation on these nodes to fuel the next wave of technology.”
2018-08-29 00:00 reading：1482
GlobalFoundries Halts 7nm Work
Trade news

GlobalFoundries Halts 7nm Work

The race to drive semiconductor technology to the bleeding edge has narrowed to three companies.Globalfoundries suspended work on a 7nm node. It will lay off less than 5% of its workforce and make its ASIC group a wholly-owned subsidiary so it can partner with one of the remaining 7nm foundries.It would have cost GF $2-4 billion to ramp up the 40-50,000 wafers/month capacity needed to have a chance of making a return on the node. “The financial investment didn’t make as much sense as doing something else,” said Tom Caulfield, the former general manager of Fab 8 named chief executive of GF in March.In an interview in May, Caulfield said GF’s owners the Mubadala Investment Company in the United Arab Emirates, wanted improved financial performance. In June, the company announced a 5% layoff without cutting any products, affecting about 900 of its 18,000 employees.“The lion’s share of our customers…have no plans for” 7nm chips. Industry-wide demand for the 14/16 node was half the volume of 28nm, and 7nm demand may be half the level of the 14/16nm node, Caulfield said.“When we look out to 2022, two-thirds of the foundry market will be in nodes at 12nm and above, so it’s not like we are conceding a big part of this market,” he added.The decision forces AMD, GF’s closest customer, to source all its initial 7nm chips from TSMC at a time when the graphics and x86 processor vendor is gaining market share. Whether AMD can get all the wafers it needs in the short term “is a good question,” said analyst Linley Gwennap of the Linley Group.“AMD was hoping GF was a second source, so it could have as many wafers as it needed but now they have to compete with Apple and others for TSMC’s attention.” Given Samsung’s decision to start production by early next year on a 7nm node with EUV steppers “everyone is flocking to TSMC for 7nm, supposedly even Qualcomm,” said Gwennap.IBM, GF’s other close partner, has more breathing room to find a new foundry for its Power10 processor, not slated to ship until 2020 or later. The two customers were part of the heritage of GF that started as a spin-off of AMD’s fabs, later acquiring Chartered in Singapore and IBM’s fab operations in 2015.For its part, GF will focus on enhancements to its 14/12nm node and the ramp of its fully depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) just starting to gain traction.GF will add to its FinFET nodes RF capabilities, new embedded memories such as MRAM and performance and leakage improvements. It is ramping its 22nm FD-SOI, working on a 12nm FD-SOI and expanding partnerships and features such as embedded memory for the process. Plans for a joint venture fab in China remain unchanged.“We call this move a pivot. We will go from needing more investment in 2019-2020 to generating respectable free cash flow in 2019 and competitive free cash flow in 2020,” targeting 10-15% of revenue, said Caulfield.Market watchers at IC Insights pegged GF as a distant second to TSMC with about $6 billion in 2017 revenues, slightly ahead of UMC and Samsung roughly tied for third at nearly $5 billion each. Overall, the move is a positive one for GF that had been increasingly falling behind TSMC in leading-edge FinFET processes, said Gwennap.“They only had one customer for 7nm, so it didn’t make sense to ramp a fab. At the rate they were going, they would have trouble generating enough revenue to keep research going. Focusing on FD-SOI and RF can keep its cost structure in line, and that should enable them at least survive and potentially do really well,” he said.Through its acquisition of IBM’s semiconductor group, GF has a significant share in making RF front ends, especially in handsets. It’s a position the foundry could parlay into other markets said multiple analysts.TSMC is the immediate winner, securing all the first wave of 7nm designs, some of which could start sampling by year’s end. However, Samsung could pick up new customers as it ramps its EUV process next year.While TSMC will probably make Qualcomm’s 7nm Snapdragon SoC expected to sample late this year, the mobile chip maker will likely move back to Samsung for a follow-on chip given their close relationship, Gwennap added.“The GF announcement almost assures TSMC to exit 2018 with 95% market share of 7nm, a very fast-growing revenue node that should be quite profitable for them. The lack of competition will result in keeping prices high,” said Len Jelinek, a chief semiconductor analyst for IHS Markit.GF’s exit from 7nm probably won’t help Samsung significantly, Jelinek said. “The new clients that would become available would be the ASIC companies that were tied to GF through the former IBM ASIC group. Although some of them may choose to go to Samsung next year, my guess is they will go to TSMC,” Jelinek said.The remaining player in the Moore’s law race, Intel, now appears to be in the middle of the pack.“Intel’s road map is so messed up right now,” said Gwennap, noting its plans to ship 10nm products in 2019 using optical steppers are at least a year behind its original schedule.Plans for a 10nm upgrade to EUV will likely be pushed off to a 7nm Intel node in 2020 or beyond. “Now Intel will be late with EUV because they have bigger problems” getting 10nm chips out, he said.GF’s news arguably is an opening for Intel’s foundry business which to date has not gotten much traction, estimated by IC Insights as less than $500 million in annual revenues. Had Intel been aggressively executing a low power foundry strategy this would have been a great opportunity to gain momentum,” Jelinek said.Overall the industry’s pace of CMOS scaling has slowed in the last two or three years, said Jelinek. “This announcement places more ownership on TSMC to be the real steward of the industry,” he said.
2018-08-28 00:00 reading：1397
GlobalFoundries Sacks 5% of Workforce
Trade news

GlobalFoundries Sacks 5% of Workforce

Globalfoundries has started a layoff aimed at trimming 5 percent of its workforce as part of its new focus on financial performance. The company does not plan to close any fabs or cut any of its existing services.The layoffs will affect about 900 of GF’s 18,000 employees, “across a variety of functional areas and all geographies,” a company spokesman said. “We remain fully committed to delivering our roadmap,” he added.The company informed workers of the cuts on Monday (June 11). It will offer a voluntary separation program it expects many people will accept.The effort aims “to improve our global cost structure and minimize redundancies that have accrued from previous mergers and acquisitions” and could take several weeks to complete, the spokesman said.GF is the world’s second largest pure-play foundry with 2017 revenues estimated at $5.86 billion by IC Insights. It started life as the spin out of AMD’s fabs, then acquired Chartered’s fabs in Singapore and IBM’s fabs in the U.S.The company is dwarfed by the sector’s dominant player, TSMC, which reported sales of $32.2 billion in 2017. Samsung, the parent company of GF's 14nm partner, is the world's fourth-largest foundry, with about $4.8 billion in 2017 foundry revenue, according to IC Insights. GF is privately owned by the Mubadala Investment Company in the United Arab Emirates. In early March, the company named Tom Caulfield, the manager of its leading-edge fab in New York, as its new CEO, marking the shift to its tighter focus on financial performance.
2018-06-13 00:00 reading：1329
Globalfoundries Names Caulfield CEO
Trade news

Globalfoundries Names Caulfield CEO

　　Sanjay Jha stepped down as chief executive of Globalfoundries after just four years on the job. Thomas Caulfield, an ex-IBM manager who runs GF’s Fab 8 in New York, has become the new CEO.　　The change comes at a key inflection point for Globalfoundries. It needs to snag major customers for its fully depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) process this year, and it will ramp its internally developed 7nm node, a potentially lucrative technology, but one about six months behind rival TSMC.　　So far, Samsung and TSMC are both ahead of GF in leading-edge nodes and packaging technologies such as TSMC’s CoWoS, a 2.5D chip stack, and InFO, a wafer-level fan-out technique. Their lead helps them capture lucrative, high-volume business such as Apple’s A-series iPhone processors, now made by TSMC, and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, made by Samsung.　　Jha leaves to pursue other opportunities, including potentially starting systems businesses at the Mubadala Investment Companyin the United Arab Emirates that owns GF. The company did not provide any details of what his new role will be at Mubadala, but said the transition had been in the works for some time and declined to make executives available for interviews.　　Caulfield, the new CEO, is credited with getting GF’s Fab 8 into volume production of 14nm process technology. It is making the Ryzen and Epyc x86 processors driving AMD’s comeback as well as IBM’s z-series mainframe and Power 9 processors.　　Caulfield spent 17 years at IBM in many roles, leading to serving as the head of its 300mm fab in East Fishkill, N.Y. After leaving IBM in 2005, he headed sales, service and marketing for four years at capital equipment supplier Novellus. Just prior to joining GF in May 2014, he was for two years the president and COO of Soraa, a developer of gallium nitride chips for solid-state lighting.　　As a private company, GF does not reveal details of its finances or wafer production. A spokesman said GF has grown revenue and market share under Jha.　　Market watcher IC Insights pegs GF as a distant second with 2017 revenues of $5.86 billion compared to TSMC at $32.2 billion. It ranks Samsung at fourth with $4.79 billion in 2017 sales, slightly behind UMC.　　Mubadala has no doubt made huge investments to expand GF’s fabs in Singapore, New York and Dresden — investments on which the new CEO will no doubt be under pressure to deliver a return. The company licensed its 14nm technology from Samsung, but developed its own 7nm process and plans to enhance it with extreme ultraviolet lithography over the next two years — systems with price tags of well over $100 million each.　　To date, the company which started its life as the manufacturing division of AMD has announced only a few customers. They include Qualcomm for unnamed products and STMicroelectronics, which is a collaborator in its initiative on FD-SOI.　　During Jha’s time at GF, the company acquired IBM’s chip manufacturing group. As part of that deal, it took on making IBM’s microprocessors as well as a relatively small but lucrative IBM foundry business in ASICs and RF for customers such as Skyworks.　　GF reports it has more than 50 first-time-right tape outs at its Fab 8 which also makes 28nm chips. It has not yet announced any customers for its 7nm process expected to start ramping late this year.　　This is a big year for GF’s entry into FD-SOI. It expects about 20 customer tape outs in the process this year in its Dresden fabs. To date, Samsung has been the source of some high-profile FD-SOI products such as NXP’s i.MX processors.　　A year ago, GF struck a deal to build in Chengdu Province what it claims could be China’s most advanced 300mm fab. It will start off transferring older processes from GF’s Singapore fabs but ultimately aims to be a source for the FD-SOI process.　　Jha came to GF after serving as CEO of Motorola Mobility, a struggling handset unit ultimately acquired and sold by Google. Prior to that he served 14 years at Qualcomm, the last two years as its COO.　　In a press statement, a Mubadala representative who chairs GF’s board expressed willingness to continue its investments in GF. He gave no indications whether the change in leadership reflected possible disagreements over strategy between Jha and Mubadala.　　“GF is a strategic asset for the global semiconductor industry and our shareholder. We will continue to invest to differentiate and grow the business and further consolidate the industry through partnerships, in a way that allows us to better serve our customers,” said Ahmed Yahia Al Idrissi, chairman of the GF board.　　“Sanjay delivered on strategic milestones which set the company on the right path and we would like to thank him for his significant contributions. Tom, with his 25-year track-record of operational excellence and delivering for customers, will take the company to the next level of success,” he added in the press statement.
2018-03-12 00:00 reading：1475
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