Travelling On The Silicon Road

Intel will port unspecified Atom processor cores to TSMC’s technology platform, including processes, IP, libraries and design flows under the terms of an agreement between the two companies announced yesterday.
 

The deal will expand the TAM for Atom. It allows TSMC & Intel to go after newer market segments together - namely the embedded, CE, netbooks and handheld market.

Some interesting highlights on this deal:

• It is indeed a rare event for Intel to allow its processor to be manufactured by another company.
• Intel has no plans to license or transfer its high-k process to TSMC. It is doubtful the TSMC Atom devices will include high-k and metal gates. Hence it’s unlikely that the core from TSMC will have the same performance level as that from Intel.
• With PC shipments failing, Intel needs to aggressively penetrate into other markets.
• Intel goes head-on with leading embedded core provider, ARM. While ARM is trying to move to larger devices (from handsets etc.) for its cores, Intel is moving in the opposite direction (PC to smaller devices)
• We may see two strong foundry-IP camps emerging: ARM-IBM alliance and Intel-TSMC for the much sought after mid size converging devices in the embedded space.
• Point to be noted is that while there are 2 different market segments for the processor – higher end processors for PCs and the lower (& cheaper ones) for MIDs, Intel will need to do a real balancing act here so as not to have its profits from the upper segment being eaten away substantially by the lesser profits of the lower end processors.
  

MIDAS, the Singapore Semiconductor Association is organizing a high profile industry event on 13^th September in Raffles Town Club, Singapore – this is mainly why off late I haven’t been able to blog as frequently as I would have wanted to (I’m helping organize the same along with my other colleagues)!

The summit, “Enabling Singapore’s Semiconductor Excellence” is a full day inaugural event. Singapore’s leading semiconductor companies, start-ups, investors, industry analysts and industry leaders will meet and discuss Singapore’s semiconductor industry and how its semiconductor community continues to address the challenges and accelerating growth. There will be a couple of panel discussions – “Singapore: Gateway to Asia-Pacific’s Semiconductor Market” (moderated by me) and “Living the Silicon Valley Dream” (moderated by Mike Holt, CEO Get2Volume).