AMD Confirms Plans for Yet Another Semiconductor Fab

by Anton Shilov
11/10/2003 | 03:12 PM

During the Annual Analyst Day late last week, Advanced Micro Devices reaffirmed its plans to establish a new fab for 65nm production. The company’s officials unfortunately did not provide any additional details about the foundry.

Commenting on the company’s decision to establish a new fab, Bill Siegle, AMD’s Senior Vice President of Technology Operations and Chief Scientist for the Sunnyvale, California-based chipmaker said: “We are not in a position to share the details, but we have a site selected and groundbreaking scheduled.”

Even though nothing concrete was stated in regards the new fab for AMD, there is a number of opportunities for the company in the field:

• A report issued earlier this year told us about IBM shutting down its Advanced Semiconductor Technology Center (ASTC) in East Fishkill and turning it into 300mm, sub-100nm fab. It was said that after the foundry is operational, IBM would turn it over to AMD, who would make its next-generation processors there.
• In mid-2002, AMD signed a memorandum of understanding with UMC and Infineon about collaboration in the field of fabrication technologies. All three companies had plans to establish a manufacturing facility in Singapore. The deal has not been finalised, however, partly as a result of technology agreement between AMD and IBM signed early this year. Nevertheless, the Sunnyvale, California-based company may still own land in Singapore as well as have intentions to build something in the country, according to CNet.
• There are other possibilities for location of the new fab for AMD as well, including, but not limited to, Austin, Texas and Dresden, Germany, where AMD already has two of its main facilities running.

AMD has had plans for the yet another facility underway for quite a long time. Looks like the company is approaching the home stretch with the final announcements of the intentions and within the next couple of month we are going to learn the location of the fab as well as to recognize a partner, if any, to build the foundry with AMD.