Qualcomm is looking to diversify their supply chain and move away from dependence on TSMC and their 28nm node. They have some qualifications for their suitor to meet and being one of the larger customers means that they just might get it. Their requirement is for the rumoured Samsung and GLOBALFOUNDRIES partnership to become stable and for Samsung to use GF as a sub-contractor to make chips for Apple. If you believe all the hints we are getting the partnership could grow and it would give Qualcomm a supplier who is financially stable and still has enough free resources to fab Qualcomm's chips in the desired volume. This is the news out of DigiTimes this morning.
"Qualcomm reportedly hopes Samsung Electronics and Globalfoundries can form an alliance, as the fabless IC vendor seeks to reduce its reliance on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) for its advanced chips, according to industry sources."
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This sounds like the worst
This sounds like the worst idea humanly possible.
Conversely to ITGuy005, this
Conversely to ITGuy005, this makes complete sense. Qualcomm sells a lot of SoCs, but cannot fab them. Currently, they’re using TSMC (and some noise about using GF). But, they want to expand and not be constrained by the capacity of any one fab house. If they could get GF and Samsung–two large, open fabs–to have a similar process flow, it would ease Qualcomm’s job of designing their chips for those two fab houses.
This makes *complete sense* from Qualcomm’s viewpoint.
I’m not quite sure what Samsung and GF get out of it. It looks like it makes each of them more vulnerable to a customer packing up and moving to the other guy.
Possibly Qualcomm can entice them both by guaranteeing them a certain volume?
http://www.commonplatform.com
http://www.commonplatform.com/ is all you need to know everything is going to be standardized at 20nm
Do not worry, for somewhere
Do not worry, for somewhere Apple is going to have to build some Fab space of its own, probably not big enough to meat Apple’s total demand, but just enough of Apples own fab space to, at first, insure a timely supply of low cost CPU/GPU parts! Later on, Apple could gradually increase this fab space to, at least remove Samsung from Apple’s supply pipeline, leaving Samsung with more capacity to provide to Qualcomm!