Angstrem, a Zelenograd, Russia-based maker of semiconductors, has acquired 130nm bulk process technology from Advanced Micro Devices, the latter said in a recent financial report. Earlier Angstrem bought AMD’s manufacturing equipment.

AMD said in its most recent financial report that it included in the results of continuing operation a $191 million of process technology license revenue. The company’s chief financial officer clarified that the firm had licensed its outdated process technology to the same company that acquired AMD’s 200mm fabrication equipment that was used in Fab 30 about five years ago.

“This technology revenue is actually associated with the sale last quarter of our 200mm tools in addition to selling the tools we actually sold some process technology to the same vendor,” said Robert J. Rivet, AMD’s chief financial officer.

AMD sold its 200mm semiconductor manufacturing equipment for $193 million in Q2 2008.

“It relates to a technology node that we had developed before we entered into the licensing or into the process technology relationship with IBM,” clarified Dirk Meyer, chief executive officer of AMD, implying that the technology does not utilize silicon-on-insulator (SOI) (which AMD started to use in 2003, when it launched AMD Opteron and AMD Athlon 64 chips) and is bulk 130nm chips that AMD utilized to produce the latest breed of AMD Athlon XP microprocessors.

In late 2006 it was reported that AMD had agreed to sell Zelenograd, Russia-based Angstrem company its 130nm manufacturing equipment from the Fab 30 in Dresden, Germany. AMD produced 30 thousand of 200mm wafers per month using its tools from Fab 30. Industry experts believed at the time that the equipment would cost Angstrem about $250 - $300 million and sources close to the deal believed that the budget “of the whole project” might increase up to $700 million in the following years. According to Russian business daily Kommersant, Angstrem managed to get a $815 million (€815 million, or $1.096 billion, according to some other data) credit from Russia’s Bank for Development and Foreign Economic Affairs to start production of chips using 0.13 micron process technology.

Presently Angstrem manufactures various controllers, processors, smart cards and other microelectronics.

Tags: AMD, Angstrem, Semiconductors