Re: Atmel sells fabs



I do electronic design and have never used a PLD .....
It looks too much like proto typing !!
You cant sell proto types ....

Its all over , turn out the lights , the party is over for I.C.
corporations .
We dont use what they make ....

By 2010 , 99% S/W 90% h/w workers will be GONE !
The P4 will stop production , end of 2007 .
Microsoft will be out of business , no one will use its software ..


A free shell that "looks and feels "
like WXP will make Linux totally transparent .










Jim Granville wrote:
Jonathan Kirwan wrote:
On Fri, 15 Dec 2006 15:45:14 +1300, Jim Granville
<no.spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


steve wrote:

http://www.edn.com/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA6399448&ref=nbednn


Yes, that's the exit statement.
No mention of what products will be impacted ?


Here is the entry statement, 6yrs ago :

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0WVI/is_2000_Sept_25/ai_65568508

Shows these stats, (at end Sept 2000)
Atmel's current fab line-up
Wafer size Processes Area (sq m) Status
Colorado Springs, US 6in 0.5 micro m 41,805 Running
Heilbronn, Germany 6in 0.5 micro m ~10,000 Running
Nantes, France 6in 0.5 micro m ~10,000 Running
Rousset, France 8in 0.35 36,045 Running, but
0.25 micro m, not complete
0.18 micro m
Irving, Texas, US 8in 0.18 micro m 60,385 Running from
Q1 2001
North Tyneside, UK 8in 0.35, 39,099 Running from
0.25 micro m Q2 2001


So they are dumping part of their .5u and .35u+.25u facilities.

Note that was at Sept 2000, so they will be more advanced now.
Heilbronn, IIRC, is their Automotive products.
The Nantes fab I think went about 1 year ago.
This is a bit more up to date
http://www.cadence.com/company/success_stories/atmel1_ss.pdf


Jim, there's an old thing I learned a long time ago. You don't buy
your own stock back. If the best you can do with your active company
cash is buy back your stock from passive investors, if you can't do
better with the money than those feeble expectations would have from
the money, you simply shouldn't be in business at all. If worried
about LBOs, go into debt by investing in a new product line or
something. But don't buy your own stock back. It's money you've
pried out of their hands and you had better be able to make it work in
an active business better than they can as mere passive investors. A
company _sells_ stock because it can use the money better than others
can, in some passive savings account.

This smacks of that, to me. If a company making ICs can't use their
FABs as well as they can use the money they will get for selling them,
they probably shouldn't be in the business of running FABs at all.
This "Fab lite" policy worries me. What about you?

Well, it is the opposite trend to someone like Microchip. We might all
grumble about the PIC core, but you have to be impressed by Microchip's
ability to make money from what is not leading edge stuff, and to
make money on one of the lowest ASPs in the industry.

The other end of the scale is someone like SiLabs (fabless)
and companies like Zilog, and even Freescale are also moving "fab lite".
I believe all Zilog's new Flash devices are foundry.

Where it bites, is when your designs use a chip that was in
the FAB that closed, and it used a process that has not been moved to a
foundry :(

Some recent-memory examples of this, were Philips Coolrunner cplds, and
AMD SPLDs. In those cases, the fab-rug was pulled, terminating products
earlier than normal.

-jg

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Atmel sells fabs
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