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The Foundry Company details capex & future processing roadmap
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The Foundry Company, formally AMD’s manufacturing facilities in Dresden, Germany has revealed certain details regarding its future plans at AMD’s investor conference held earlier today. Doug Grose, the new CEO of The Foundry Company highlighted that capital spending for 2009 would be $900 million, which will primarily target the first phase tool install and start-up operations at Fab38 by the end of 2009 with volume production expected in 2010. Spending will also go to Fab36 for the full fab conversion to 45nm process technology and certain start-up construction costs related to Fab 4X.
Grose said that an additional $300 million will be spent on R&D, sales & marketing, design enablement and IT, related to establishing its foundry operations.
Fab capacity for 2009 is reliant on Fab 36, which is expected to above 25,000wspm, or more than 300,000 300mm wafers per annum. In 2010, this is expected to increase to over 400,000 wafers per annum as Fab 38 continues to ramp at a total cost of $2 billion and reach capacity of 25,000wspm, according to Grose. In 2011, total annual wafer capacity is put at close to 600,000, 300mm wafers.
Fab 4X is expected to come online in 2012, using 22nm process technology. The Foundry Company expects the major ramp to be in 2013, taking total wafer capacity to over 800,000. Total spending on Fab 4X is expected to $4 billion.
The Foundry Company is also planning to introduce a 32nm Bulk CMOS process at Fab 38 in Q409 that will initially be used for GPU production for AMD. Interestingly, The Foundry Company is planning a 32nm Bulk CMOS HKMG low power option in the first-half of 2010, which could be significantly earlier than its major rivals, TSMC, UMC, SMIC and Chartered Semiconductor.
A 32nm SOI high performance process using high-k and metal gates (HKMG) at Fab 36 will be introduced in the first-half of 2010 for AMD’s microprocessors, just 15 months after 45nm volume production started, if execution is in the first quarter.
