The Foundry Market Is Hopping Again!

With reports of Q2 2009 foundry sales doubling compared to Q1 2009, foundries are increasing capital expenditures, beefing up design enablement tools and keeping their fingers crossed that improved sales will last for more than just two quarters.
The big news is that GLOBALFOUNDRIES is already making progress on their goal to win new sales from major semiconductor manufacturers with their announcement of STMicroelectronics as a strategic customer. Not only is STMicroelectronics a significant addition, their product focus with GLOBALFOUNDRIES will start with low power 40nm products. That’s a very nice win as the big three foundries are also courting new customers at that technology. But will GLOBALFOUNDRIES be able to keep up with all the design enablement offerings that are being developed by their competitors?
The Common Platform has taken another step toward a full service design to manufacturing service with the addition of the Synopsys design flow system Lynx into their ecosystem. The focus of this ARM-Synopsys-Common Platform partnership is on ARM’s high performance low power processor architecture combined with IBM’s high-k metal-gate 32/28nm low power process and the Synopsys design flow. Common Platform customers will have access to all this expertise with the potential benefit of getting 32nm/28nm products to market much earlier than originally planned.

What more could our industry ask for? Exciting sales reports, new customer engagements and new alliances which promote early access to innovative technology all signal healthy growth for the coming months. Once again this industry will reward those who can clear a path through the pessimism and keep an eye on the prize: innovative new products.
Joanne Itow