The Week in Review: March 6
It was a good week for globalization, but a bad week for the global economy.
ARM made a “strategic” investment in eSOL, a Japanese embedded software vendor. The real way to read this announcement is that ARM has bought its way into the Japanese car market, which is about the only way you can actually get into that market if you’re an outsider. Despite its prowess around the globe in many markets, Japan’s domestic market remains impossible for non-Japanese companies to crack. But the downturn is hurting Japanese companies, too. Remember when Japanese firms were buying up U.S. real estate in the 1980s?
The economy may be down, but that isn’t stopping Moore’s Law. Mentor Graphics issued an announcement that STMicro is using its Eldo simulator to characterize 32nm cell libraries. Seems like the folks in Europe are staying busy to keep from freezing (or at least to justify their jobs.) Get ready for more power islands, really complex verification—as if it wasn’t complex enough before—and lots of complaints about tools not doing enough because there’s now lots more to do.
That’s only part of the shift, though. While companies like ST, TI and Intel push to the next process node, others are jumping a half node. TSMC is looking at half-node increments to stay ahead of the pack, which may explain why NEC has partnered with Virage Logic at 40nm.
Speaking of TSMC, did anyone notice that Intel is pushing its Atom chip into the commercial foundry world? The two companies inked a deal to collaborate on IP, platform and SoC solutions involving Atom. There are two ways to read this. One is that, in light of Intel’s $7 billion investment to upgrade its fabs, Intel doesn’t see Atom as a core part of its chip lineup. The other way is that Intel believes it can further reduce costs on its core platform by outsourcing some of the manufacturing. Our guess is there’s a little bit of both involved, meaning Intel is hedging its bets on whether Atom will really pay off while simultaneously giving it a chance to compete with ARM.
The competitive stakes for Intel are growing from a different side, as well. Intel has always been proud of its ability to maintain its own fabs. The spinoff of AMD’s fab business and a subsequent investment into that business by Abu Dhabi-based Advanced Technology Investment Co.—read huge oil company profits looking for a new market opportunity—could make even Intel question its go-it-alone strategy. AMD’s ploy is to open its fab to outsiders while reaping the same unbridled flow of information back and forth between fab and design team—while utilizing capacity from outside companies the way IBM has done with its fab in East Fishkill, N.Y.
And if that doesn’t make chip manufacturing interesting enough, Shanghai-based SMIC received approval from the U.S. government to export its 32nm technology to the United States. That SMIC has gone from 65nm to 32nm and is now talking about success at 45nm is rather surprising, considering the bulk of its work has been at 180nm. That the U.S. government isn’t putting up any roadblocks is less surprising—at least when you think about all those U.S. bonds being held by the Chinese government. The last thing the U.S. can afford right now is a trade war with China, and SMIC is one of China’s most important companies.
–Ed Sperling
Tags: AMD, ARM, economics, eSOL, IBM, Mentor Graphics, Moore's Law, STMicro, TI, TSMC, Virage Logic