Did GlobalFoundries Give Up 7nm to Chase Silicon Photonics Manufacturing?

[erek]

Uncertain about the implications of this. Do you know?

"The booming datacenter business is only expected to grow from here—it’s projected that by 2021, it will account for 20.6 zettabytes of IP traffic per year. To get an idea of the growth rate, in 2017 it was at 9.1 zettabytes per year. Along with this, grows the need for faster interconnects. GF estimates that SiPho-based transceivers, which includes both III-V semiconductors as well as silicon photonics based modules, will make up a large portion of a $4B market by the year 2024, due to an impressive 44.5% CAGR. That’s a big addressable market for GlobalFoundries. Through strategic acquisitions, such as IBM’s microelectronics business, and fruitful partnerships with the likes of Ayar Labs and MACOM, GlobalFoundries quietly became a force in silicon photonics. It’s already captured 10% of the foundry business—if it continues at this rate, it will soon be impossible to overlook."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/moorin...silicon-photonics-manufacturing/#11d0d31d8bdb

 

[Lakados]

Good for them on branching out, 7nm isn’t cheap to produce and getting it working with out stepping on patents from Intel, TSMC, and Samsung would probably be pretty tough. I think they were smart to branch off into new space and find their own market. They can always move onto 7nm once it is more mainstream and the costs to implement are more reasonable.

 

[Thunderdolt]

They might be taking the long view as well and thus seeing 7nm as a temporary pass through to the longer life target of 5nm. With mobile continuing to grow rapidly, they may be able to capture more of that market on 5nm rather than 7nm, especially after considering how late to the game they would be for 7nm..

 

[DanNeely]

They might be taking the long view as well and thus seeing 7nm as a temporary pass through to the longer life target of 5nm. With mobile continuing to grow rapidly, they may be able to capture more of that market on 5nm rather than 7nm, especially after considering how late to the game they would be for 7nm..

Unless they buy a 7nm process from someone else to start with they'd still need to fully R&D through their abandoned 7nm work (or start over if it failed into a dead end) to start on 5. Trying to cram too many improvements into a single process is how the Intel 10nm debacle began. They bailed on 7nm and other leading edge processes because the R&D had gotten too expensive to sustain with their limited production volumes in favor of parts of the market where features other than increasingly small transistors were driving new processes because specialized processes had lower R&D costs to develop.

Barring some breakthrough that clears the board of existing implementations and serves as a reset on development costs I don't expect GloFo to ever have a new high performance process.

 

[Aix.]

I know some of these words.

 

[Marees]

Automobile sector makes up for missing advanced node business

https://www.anandtech.com/show/2126...are-migrating-to-sub10nm-faster-than-expected

Back in 2022, communication infrastructure and datacenter revenue accounted for 18% of the company's earnings, but in 2023, that share dropped to 12%. Shares of PC and smart mobile devices declined from 4% and 46% in 2022 to 3% and 41%, respectively. Meanwhile the share of automotive-related revenue increased from 5% in 2022 to 14% in 2023, which is a reason for optimism as GlobalFoundries expects automotive growth to offset declines of other applications that transit from 12LP+ to newer nodes.

"[Automotive] products span the breadth of our portfolio from 12 LP+, our FinFET platform, all the way through our expanded voltage handling capabilities at a 130 nm and a 180 nm technologies," said Caulfield. "Through these offerings, we believe that GF will play a key role in the long-term transition of the automotive industry, and our customer partnerships are central to that.

GlobalFoundries revenue topped $7.392 billion for the whole year 2023, down from $8.108 billion in 2022 due to inventory adjustments by some customers and migration of others to different foundries and nodes. Meanwhile, the company remained profitable and earned $1.018 billion, down from $1.446 billion a year before.

 

[Armenius]

I didn't even know GlobalFoundries was still around.

 

[DanNeely]

I didn't even know GlobalFoundries was still around.

There's a huge number of semi conductor companies that have dropped out of the leading edge rat-race over the decades and are still in business selling older nodes to companies who have no need/use for advanced processes. You can buy simple chips fabbed on >100nm processes today.