Travelling On The Silicon Road

IBM and its Common Platform agreement partners will extend their development relationship to 32nm too.

The group started with 2 partners – IBM and Chartered. This later included Infineon, Samsung, and now Freescale. In addition, with the collapse of Crolles Alliance, it can also draw more partners.

While collaboration is a necessity in these process nodes and the Common Platform Agreement has been doing quite well, there have been reports (which subsequently have been dismissed as rumours) that the foundry vendors in the alliance are struggling with compatibility issues - and this can get compounded with increasing number of members.

So, a foundry has closed the gap with an IDM!

In all likelihoods, TSMC will be in volume production for 45nm at the same time as Intel – in first half of 2008. As noted by David Manners in an an earlier post, “With all this third party expertise soaking up the industry’s value-add, where is there to go for the IDMs?”