July Update: ST, GF, Arm, GPUs...and just CHIPS

Finally, a monthly update which appears in its advertised slot on the last Friday of the month.

ST and GF in Crolles

When planar transistors ran out of steam due to leakage, the reason was that too much of the channel was far from the gate and so was not well controlled when it was meant to be switched off. One way to get more of the gate close to the channel was to wrap the gate around the channel, which led to the FinFET. But another approach was to back the channel with buried oxide, an insulator so that there were no sneaky paths far from the gate. This was FD-SOI.

FD-SOI was originally invented at ST Microelectronics. You can read the history of this development in my post Silicon on Nothing: the Origins of FD-SOI. ST developed the process at 28nm and ran it in their fab at Crolles, which is a short distance north-east of Grenoble. ST then licensed it to GlobalFoundries. Everyone assumed GF would run a 28nm FD-SOI foundry business, but for the first year or two, nothing was announced. GF actually further developed the process and released a 22nm version that it called 22FDX. You can read about that process and also a lot of basic FD-SOI information, such as forward and reverse bias, in my post Cadence Tool Suite Qualified for 22FDX Reference Flow.

In that era, GF was still in the race to the single-digit nanometer. But in 2018, it dropped out of that race to focus on other processes such as FD-SOI. The most advanced GF FinFET process is 12nm. You can read about that in my posts GTC: GlobalFoundries Pivots and GLOBALFOUNDRIES After the Pivot.

Anyway, that is all background to the announcement this month that ST and GF would build a new 300mm fab at Crolles. I think this will be the first 300mm fab to be built in Europe since AMD's fab in Dresden which is now GF's fab 1, although Intel has also announced plans to build a fab in Magdeburg. The press release gives some more specifics:

STMicroelectronics...and GlobalFoundries Inc...today announced they have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to create a new, jointly-operated 300mm semiconductor manufacturing facility adjacent to ST’s existing 300mm facility in Crolles, France. This facility is targeted to ramp at full capacity by 2026, with up to 620,000 300mm wafer per year production at full build-out (~42% ST and ~58% GF).

ST and GF are committed to building capacity for their European and global customer base. This new facility will support several technologies, in particular FD-SOI-based technologies, and will cover multiple variants. This includes GF’s market-leading FDX technology and ST’s comprehensive technology roadmap down to 18nm, which are expected to remain in high demand for Automotive, IoT, and Mobile applications for the next few decades.

The French government is providing some of the funding, although the release just says:

ST and GF will receive significant financial support from the State of France for the new facility. This facility will strongly contribute to the objectives of the European Chips Act, including the goal of Europe reaching 20% of worldwide semiconductor production by 2030.

CHIPS Act

I've updated this section of this post several times this week as the situation in DC changed. Here's the opening paragraph of SEMI's press release today (Thursday) since I trust them more than the general press who know little about the semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem:

SEMI, the industry association serving the global electronics design and manufacturing supply chain, today applauded the passage of the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 by the United States House of Representatives. The bill provides a 25% tax credit for U.S. facilities that produce semiconductors or chipmaking equipment and $52 billion in funding for new semiconductor programs. The funding includes $39 billion for grants available to semiconductor manufacturers as well as equipment and materials suppliers and $11 billion for federal semiconductor research programs.

The general press portrays this as to do with competition in semiconductors from China, but as far as I know, US manufacturers of electronic products do not use any chips manufactured in mainland China. Of course, they use a lot of chips manufactured in Taiwan.

There is also a separate FABS Act that provides tax credits for "investment in a semiconductor manufacturing facility and semiconductor manufacturing property." No, I have no idea what the difference is between a facility and a property. These acts often have very contrived names to make them an acronym, but this one actually works: FABS is Facilitating American-Built Semiconductors.

Arm IPO on Hold

The Financial Times said that Softbank has put Arm's IPO on hold. This Reuters report makes little sense though, since it says this is due to political turmoil in the UK government (there is a prime-minister transition in progress). But the plan of record, and Softbank founder Masayoshi Son, have always expressed a preference for a US listing since most customers are US-based. Watch this space, I guess.

Crypto and GPUs

A lot of GPUs have been used for crypto mining, making them almost impossible to buy except at wildly inflated prices. If you want to use them for AI training or just for, you know, what they were originally designed for, namely gaming, then bad luck. But crypto has crashed. As a result...well, see this piece Below MSRP and Only Getting Cheaper: The GPU Deluge Begins. Or this article subtitled The Return of the GPU.

McLaren and Cadence

GPUs may be fast, but Formula 1 is faster! No technical content here, really. But an update on McLaren, and an opportunity to see lots of Cadence logos on the cars!

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