14 DAY TRIAL // According to recent reports, Globalfoundries is on track to ramp up production of the 28nm manufacturing process by 2011. In addition, Tom Sonderman, Globalfoundries vice president of manufacturing systems and technology, has confirmed that the company is ready to break ground for this new facility (Fab 2) at the Luther Forest Technology Campus in New York, as early as July. The VP has also announced that the yields for 45nm technology have matured and that the company is now heading towards the next-generation 28nm.
The recently founded Globalfoundries is already seen as a potential competitor for the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), just a few months since its debut on the market. One of the main reasons for this comparison is that the Globalfoundries is currently planning to ramp up production of the next-generation 32nm and 28nm manufacturing technologies, consequently providing support for AMD's next-generation processors.
In a recent news-article on Digitimes, Tom Sonderman has said that the company is currently planning to ramp 28nm at Fab 2, as it has already seen mature 45nm yields. It is also planning to migrate all production of 40/45nm to Fab 1 by the end of this year, consequently paving the way for sub 28nm production. According to Sonderman, Globalfoundries is aiming to advance its process technology to sub-45nm class ahead of the world's leading chip maker, Intel.
In an additional note, AMD has just announced that is has successfully ramped up production of its new graphics chips, using TSMC's 40nm node, meaning that the company is on schedule to deliver the new cards before the end of this year. These new GPUs are said to provide users with support for Microsoft's next-generation DirectX 11 API, which AMD has recently demonstrated during a presentation at Computex in Taiwan.