Stefan Mileschin

AMD has told an institutional investor conference that it is not going to contract more foundry suppliers than Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing and GlobalFoundries.

The rumour is AMD was desperate to get more 28nm chips made and was looking away from its usual chums at TSMC and GlobalFoundries because they can't make them fast enough.

Undersupply of 28nm process has forced Qualcomm to shift part of its contracts away from TSMC to United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC), Samsung Electronics and GlobalFoundries.

AMD inists that it has no plan to add foundry sources as it has not felt the impact of the short supply.

According to Taiwan Economic News, the cunning plan is to keep TSMC as contract supplier of its graphic chip Sea Islands and GlobalFoundries as contract supplier of its accelerated processing unit Kaveri. TSMC will also make AMD's embedded APU Kabini and cut price APU Temash, which will shift to 28nm process in 2013.

In the second half of the year AMD will give the 28nm graphic chip Southern Islands to TSMC and the 32nm SOI APU Trinity to GlobalFoundries.

Meanwhile TSMC gets the 40nm processor Brazos 2.0 and plans to farm out production of its 40nm APU Hondo for Windows 8 tablet PCs to the foundry giant some time in the second half of this year.

AMD Chief Executive Officer Rory Read thinks that Windows-powered tablets would take up 20 percent of the global market for tablets over the next three years.

http://news.techeye.net/chips/amd-do...more-foundries