Is IBM building a fab for AMD?

According to the report, IBM is equipping one of its buildings in East Fishkill with a 300mm (12-inch) fab, and will give that fab to AMD for it to make future microprocessors.

We reported on the 18th of May, in this article from the AMD Opteron launch, that AMD no longer really has a chip R&D facility. The CPU team is already in FIshkill.

The report also suggests there is a wholesale move of AMD process engineers from their current offices in California to New York state, all with the aim of fashioning CPUs at 65 nanometers and using silicon on insulator technology.

The IBM East Fishkill fab is a leading edge factory belonging to Big Blue's Microelectronics division. In the last nine months IBM has turned the factory into a foundry and recruited a number of customers from Taiwanese foundry firms TSMC and UMC.

Earlier this year, an IBM executive suggested that AMD would die within the next five years, and there have been persistent rumours forever that IBM might take over the Intel competitor.

Again, earlier this year, AMD and IBM announced a joint venture which effectively meant they would cooperate together on future chip technology, although details of that deal were sketchy, at best.

The current CEO of AMD, Hector Ruiz, was at one point a Motorola executive, and closely cooperated with IBM on PowerPC architecture.

Ruiz was president of Motorola's semiconductor products sector, and in 1998 signed a seven year deal with AMD to share copper interconnect technology. µ

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