MUNICH, Germany — In its quest to compete against well-entrenched foundry giants, Globalfoundries is betting on creating an ecosystem of technology partners such as research institutes and IP vendors such as ARM. The message is that in a world of increasingly complex design and production issues only team player have a chance to succeed.

After Chartered Semiconductors' recent shareholder approval to be acquired by ATIC and subsequently to be integrated into the Globalfoundries group, the shape of a 'distributed' foundry provider becomes visible. By the end of the current year, steps towards an "integrated operation" can happen, said Udo Nothelfer, Globalfoundries Vice President and general manager for the company's fab 1 in Dresden (Germany). While Nothelfer regards the relationship with Chartered as "extremely symbiotic", no complete homogenization of business activities and production process is planned. "There will be some overlap and the integration of Chartered will give us some production capacity backup", Nothelfer said at a press event in Dresden.

Currently preparing for ramping up its 32nm SOI production for AMD microprocessors, Globalfoundries is already looking at the 28 nm node for bulk silicon. "32nm bulk won't be really a Foundry node, we learned from our customers," Nothelfer said. While he did not provide a timeline, he said the 28nm node could be very relevant for the production of graphics processors (GPUs) for processor vendor AMD's subsidiary ATI. "This could be the entry point for ATI [as an additional customer]", he said.

Heading for the 28nm node: Fab 1 general manager Udo Nothelfer

The company is also working arduously to build up the IP ecosystem it needs to bolster its customer offerings. Against the background of growing product and process complexity, design productivity is lagging; "out-of-the-box" chip designs typically require a range of optimizations depending on the target application, explained director of design engineering, Gerd Teepe.