TSMC Chosen as Future Processor Foundry by Sun

Published: February 21, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The mystery about who Sun Microsystems is going to choose to manufacture its future generations of UltraSparc and Sparc T series processors is over. Sun has never been a microprocessor manufacturer, but rather is a chip designer that has relied on third parties to make its chips. But with Texas Instruments planning to exit the foundry business after the 65 nanometer generation is complete, which it quietly announced last year, Sun has been shopping around for a new foundry partner.

With its server and workstation processor partnerships with both Advanced Micro Devices and Intel, Sun could have gone with either of these vendors for future processors based on 45 nanometer and smaller chip processes. Intel has already ramped up its 45 nanometer processes, and AMD is working on it on a relatively short time frame, while Sun's future 16-core "Rock" and 8-core "Niagara-3" processors are only moving to 65 nanometer processes. TI has fallen behind other higher-volume chip makers in developing ever-smaller transistors, and that is one of the reasons it cannot afford to stay in this foundry business any more. Sun has partnered with IBM for server module packaging in the past, and IBM is no slouch when it comes to chip processes, but a partnership between IBM and Sun never seemed quite as possible as one between AMD or Intel and Sun for making chips. And considering the delays that Fujitsu has had getting the dual-core Sparc64=VI processors out the door (they were years later than expected), even though Fujitsu was a second-source foundry for Sun in the heady days of the UltraSparc-II chip era during the dot-com boom, Fujitsu is probably going to have as much trouble remaining in the foundry racket as TI has had.

Well, as it turns out, none of these vendors mentioned above got the deal with Sun to make its future chips. But Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company did get the deal, Sun said this week.

According to Fadi Azhari, director of marketing for Sparc CMT technology at Sun's Microelectronics group, Sun looked at all the major foundry players--whom he could not name--and chose TSMC because the transistor processes and roadmaps for 45 nanometer and smaller chip processes matched up to Sun's roadmap. Azhari says that unlike TI, which created a foundry for its own purposes and then helped cover its costs by fabbing chips for a handful of outside vendors, TSMC was created to be an open foundry, and it uses open source tools to govern its chip processes to make it easy for third parties to use its fabs. (The fact that vice president of research and development at TSMC is named Jack Sun played no part in the decision, apparently.) Like Intel, TSMC is already in production with its first rev of 45 nanometer technology (started in the fall of 2007, just like Intel), and hopefully Sun will be able to ramp up its roadmaps for Niagara and Rock chips to add more cores, threads, and features to these processor lines than would have been possible at the relatively slow pace that TI moved ahead in chip processes. TSMC has some microprocessor partners already, so Sun is not blazing a trail here as it was with TI.

Incidentally, the TI engineering teams are working with Sun and TSMC to make a smooth transition, and during the 45 nanometer generation of Sun chips, TI will be doing some of the work on so-called back-end processes--testing, packaging, and shipping--of the chip manufacturing process. TSMC will be making the silicon for these 45 nanometer devices, and on future 32 nanometer and smaller processes, Sun will pick another back-end partner.

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