Korean media is suggesting “the most potential candidates” to choose up AMD’s one-time manufacturing wing, Global Foundries, might be native legends Samsung and SK Hynix. The reviews of the corporate’s largest shareholder attempting to dump its stake within the third largest semiconductor foundry on the earth got here out final week, and the rumours are gaining momentum of management shifting to South Korea.
There had been some expectation that consumers from China can be supremely serious about gaining management over the one-time AMD foundry, however due to present commerce tensions between the US and China it appears unlikely that ATIC, the corporate controlling 90% of GloFo inventory, would authorise a sale to a Chinese operation. ATIC is a state-run enterprise operated by the United Arab Emirates, however GloFo remains to be headquartered in Santa Clara, so promoting to a US-friendly South Korean enterprise is way extra seemingly.
Things have been going south for Global Foundries because it struggles to maintain up with contract manufacturing rivals, TSMC. Indeed it gave up on the costly chase for 7nm course of know-how final 12 months, ceding massive chunks of AMD silicon manufacturing to TSMC, such because the 7nm AMD Navi graphics chips and elements of the Ryzen 3000 CPUs.
It does nonetheless have a great deal of AMD manufacturing in-house, with the 14nm I/O parts of the brand new Zen 2 chiplet design coming from its fabs, and all present 14nm and 12nm manufacturing sticking with Global Foundries. But because the purple staff slowly transitions its product stacks in direction of the 7nm node it’s going to battle to depend on its erstwhile homeowners.
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Global Foundries was initially the manufacturing arm of AMD, earlier than it opted to separate it off in 2009 as a three way partnership with Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC) to create a world contract producer. Hence the brand new title. AMD then grew to become a fabless semiconductor firm, regardless of founder Jerry Sanders claiming “real men have fabs” when speaking about its place as a top-tier chipmaker alongside Intel.
AMD was then Global Foundries first buyer and chargeable for all its silicon wants, till comparatively lately. In truth AMD has simply introduced the seventh amendment to its Wafer Supply Agreement with GloFo, that means that it not has to pay royalties to the corporate when it chooses to supply manufacturing elsewhere, saving it hundreds of thousands, and reducing a giant income stream from its outdated fab associate.
Now GloFo shares simply 8.4% of the worldwide manufacturing market, behind TSMC and Samsung, however Business Korea (through HotHardware) is now suggesting it might kind some type of silicon supergroup with the South Korean large and pair up.
“Global Foundries is unlikely to be bought by a Chinese company, such as SMIC, in that the U.S. government is keeping China in check in various industries,” an business insider says to Business Korea. “The most potential candidates include South Korean companies such as Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, and Samsung Electronics can increase its share in the market to 23% at once if it takes over Global Foundries.”
That would nonetheless put Samsung behind TSMC, with 50% of the worldwide foundry market, however would nonetheless give it an enormous quantity of sway in manufacturing phrases. But reminiscence producer, SK Hynix, would even be an excellent match on condition that it makes an enormous quantity of the world’s reminiscence too.
So far there are not any publicly disclosed offers on the desk, but it surely’s going to be fascinating to see how this all performs out.
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