Stefan Mileschin

AMD’s Q3 2015 earnings release just hit the wire a bit ago, and while we’re still working on putting together that story we wanted to immediately jump into what is the biggest news to come out of today’s release. As part of their wave of news releases this afternoon, AMD is announcing that they will be spinning off their back-end manufacturing operations into a new joint venture with Nantong Fujitsu Microelectronics (NFME), with NFME essentially buying the bulk of these operations off of AMD.

Briefly then, in the world of semiconductor manufacturing the complete process of creating a chip is divided into two halves. There is the front-end manufacturing step where a complete wafer of chips is fabbed, and the back-end manufacturing step where those finished wafers are tested and cut up into individual chips for customer use. Dubbed ATMP – for assembly, test, mark, and pack – these back-end operations are in modern times split up from the fabbing step for cost reasons. Consequently capital-intensive and technologically advanced fabbing process will take place in facilities like TSMC Taiwan, GlobalFoundries Germany, and Intel US, while ATMP takes place at facilities in China, Malaysia, and Vietnam.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9723/a...or-371-million