In-Stat Focuses on Three Drivers for GlobalFoundries' Future Growth

In-Stat reportedly announced that the planned merger of GlobalFoundries and Chartered Semiconductor under the former’s name represents a huge step for the new company and will create a major shift in the semiconductor foundry industry. The latter was recently acquired by Advanced Technology Investment Company, or ATIC , which is the financial backer of GlobalFoundries and its parent company Advanced Micro Devices (News - Alert), or AMD.

Earlier this month, ATIC reportedly entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Chartered Semiconductor for $1.8 billion, and will pay nearly $1.9 per share in cash, which is marginally more than the chipmaker's closing price on Sept 4.

Research analysts also said that the firm had identified three critical factors for the new company’s long-term success, which may be gauged by the number and significance of new customers it is able to establish, the new combined potential semiconductor volumes it can constantly deliver, and joining the Common Platform manufacturing alliance.

In-Stat (News - Alert) said the first factor is that GlobalFoundries has already announced that STMicroelectronics will be working with the company for wireless devices.

Recently STMicroelectronics (News - Alert) reportedly collaborated with a quality partner to successfully monitor and improve the quality of STMicroelectronics’ internally developed semiconductor Intellectual Property blocks. Although ST had evolved comprehensive and clear design standards that have been ratified for quality over the years, these became inadequate in computational terms once the current number of more than 50 Intellectual Property blocks for the Systems on Chip had increased the complexity of architecture and exponentially pumped up the data to be monitored.

To bridge all the resulting gaps, ST’s HED group reportedly first sat down with the partner’s quality team to clearly define all requirements, and then the two companies together worked out an accurate and workable method that essentially revolves around the partner’s quality solution, which extracts key data from the Intellectual Property design flow, achieves on the fly quality monitoring during the development cycle, provides automated production of Intellectual Property integration documents, and also delivers more controlled supervision of all the Intellectual Property blocks of a defined SoC.

Such a development from a major customer makes life easy for GlobalFoundries to produce more since standards and quality tests are well defined and guaranteed to be speeded up.

In-Stat said that the second critical factor is the company has broken ground on new capacity at the same time it builds out capacity at Fab 1, which was formerly Fabs 36 and 38.

The third critical factor, officials said, was that the alliance with Chartered Semiconductor has helped GlobalFoundries to formally join the Common Platform alliance, and this gives the Common Platform alliance significantly enhanced value as an alternative to Taiwan Semiconductor (News - Alert) Manufacturing Company ,or TSMC, the world’s foundry powerhouse.