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The mystery about who Sun Microsystems
is going to choose to manufacture its future generations of UltraSparc
and Sparc T series processors is over. Sun has never been a
microprocessor manufacturer, but rather is a chip designer that has
relied on third parties to make its chips. But with Texas Instruments
planning to exit the foundry business after the 65 nanometer generation
is complete, which it quietly announced last year, Sun has been
shopping around for a new foundry partner.
With its server and workstation processor partnerships with both Advanced Micro Devices and Intel,
Sun could have gone with either of these vendors for future processors
based on 45 nanometer and smaller chip processes. Intel has already
ramped up its 45 nanometer processes, and AMD is working on it on a
relatively short time frame, while Sun's future 16-core "Rock" and
8-core "Niagara-3" processors are only moving to 65 nanometer
processes. TI has fallen behind other higher-volume chip makers in
developing ever-smaller transistors, and that is one of the reasons it
cannot afford to stay in this foundry business any more. Sun has
partnered with IBM for
server module packaging in the past, and IBM is no slouch when it comes
to chip processes, but a partnership between IBM and Sun never seemed
quite as possible as one between AMD or Intel and Sun for making chips.
And considering the delays that Fujitsu
has had getting the dual-core Sparc64=VI processors out the door (they
were years later than expected), even though Fujitsu was a
second-source foundry for Sun in the heady days of the UltraSparc-II
chip era during the dot-com boom, Fujitsu is probably going to have as
much trouble remaining in the foundry racket as TI has had.
Well, as it turns out, none of these vendors mentioned above got the deal with Sun to make its future chips. But Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company did get the deal, Sun said this week.
According
to Fadi Azhari, director of marketing for Sparc CMT technology at Sun's
Microelectronics group, Sun looked at all the major foundry
players--whom he could not name--and chose TSMC because the transistor
processes and roadmaps for 45 nanometer and smaller chip processes
matched up to Sun's roadmap. Azhari says that unlike TI, which created
a foundry for its own purposes and then helped cover its costs by
fabbing chips for a handful of outside vendors, TSMC was created to be
an open foundry, and it uses open source tools to govern its chip
processes to make it easy for third parties to use its fabs. (The fact
that vice president of research and development at TSMC is named Jack
Sun played no part in the decision, apparently.) Like Intel, TSMC is
already in production with its first rev of 45 nanometer technology
(started in the fall of 2007, just like Intel), and hopefully Sun will
be able to ramp up its roadmaps for Niagara and Rock chips to add more
cores, threads, and features to these processor lines than would have
been possible at the relatively slow pace that TI moved ahead in chip
processes. TSMC has some microprocessor partners already, so Sun is not
blazing a trail here as it was with TI.
Incidentally,
the TI engineering teams are working with Sun and TSMC to make a smooth
transition, and during the 45 nanometer generation of Sun chips, TI
will be doing some of the work on so-called back-end
processes--testing, packaging, and shipping--of the chip manufacturing
process. TSMC will be making the silicon for these 45 nanometer
devices, and on future 32 nanometer and smaller processes, Sun will
pick another back-end partner.
Read the original article: http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug022108-story07.html
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