Chartered Semi to introduce 65 nano chip soon

KEVIN MEYER VP at Chartered Semi, said that the only way to meet the demands of rising costs of semiconductor manufacturing was for firms to work together. So clearly the main thrust of his talk here at Antwerp was how Chartered could woo the members of the fabless audience.

Chartered Semi is a pure play foundry but said Meyer, a deal between it, IBM and a number of other industry players gave it the edge over both pure play foundries and firms like Intel which go it alone.

He said that Chartered will have 65 nanometre transistors available by the end of this year, but declined to say which of his customers would be announcing it. He also said that quantities would ramp during 2006.

Meyer said that fab return on investment has gone from as low as 5,000 units to over five million units. He said these days that if you miss your market window by a month that could be at least 25 per cent of your revenues gone.

He said that the cost of a transistor is virtually nothing and MIPS is almost coming for free. In the late 80s and 90s everyone was an integrated design manufacturer, you could afford to build fabs and develop your own design chains and IP. You probably had an internal OEM that was guiding your design all the way through. That's no longer the case. Funds and funding expect semiconductor firms turn a profit in a minimal period of time. At 300mm there's advanced process control and with microprocessors maintaining the performance.

At 130 nanometre the industry had a significant bump in the road because of the introduction of copper and other technologies. Manufacturers now have to use different types of transistor. The industry is now having to manage leakage at the system rather than the atomic level.

He said that SOI is one way of improving performance as well as high k dielectrics. But in parallel the cost of the design is rising to get them through various stages before you're ready to print the chips.

There's also a rise in the number of software engineers rising against the hardware engineers. A lot of that investment is going into India because that's where you can get software expertise these days.

Chartered has an alliance with Samsung, Infineon and IBM because they all bring different elements to the party. Chartered is jointly developing at East Fishkill for 90, at 65 and at 45 nanometres. And Sony and AMD are in a joint deal at East Fishkill over silicon on insulator.

Going to 65 nanometre for TSMC is likely to cost it $1 billion, but Chartered's partnership means it's going to cost it much less to move to 90, 65 and at 45 nanometres, Meyer claimed.