AMD Has Internal 45 nm Silicon; 45 nm Production Expected in First Half
David Lammers, News Editor -- Semiconductor International, 1/17/2008 3:54:00 PM
Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD, Sunnyvale, Calif.) has “internal samples” of 45 nm silicon now, said Dirk Meyer, president and COO, putting the company on track to start ramping 45 nm microprocessor production in the first half of this year.
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| Dirk Meyer, president and COO, AMD |
In a conference call Thursday (Jan. 17) following the release of the fourth-quarter and year-ending financial results, Meyer also said that revised 65 nm Barcelona quad-core silicon, using the “B3” stepping of the Barcelona mask set aimed at fixing a table lookup problem with the original Barcelona silicon, “is out of the fab and is being put through its paces internally.”
The corrected Barcelona MPUs will reach the engineering sample stage soon, with production sampling later in the first quarter. Servers based on the B3 stepping will begin shipping “later in the second quarter,” Meyer said, starting with a 2.3 GHz product at the high end of the speed range and moving to 2.5 GHz later in the second quarter.
Asked if AMD is confident that the table lookup problem has been resolved, Meyer said the fix is “easy to validate internally and so we are confident.” A B2 stepping version of Barcelona can overcome the problem with a Linux patch, allowing AMD to ship Barcelona B2 stepping silicon to customers selling large-cluster servers. However, tier-one server vendors are awaiting the B3 stepping later in the first quarter, he added. About 400,000 quad-core MPUs shipped in the fourth quarter, despite the design glitch.
AMD CEO Hector Ruiz declined to reveal details about the company’s manufacturing outsourcing plans, called “asset smart” within AMD. He said that the company continues to upgrade the former 200 mm Fab 30 in Dresden, Germany, to 300 mm capabilities, with the fab then taking on the designation of Fab 38.
With Fab 36 and what he called “the Fab 38 addendum” in Dresden, and additional capacity at Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Ltd. (Singapore), Ruiz said AMD should be able to increase its capacity this year to meet an expected 15% increase in unit shipments by the overall microprocessor sector.
“We could bring up an additional 5-10% of capacity within 30 days if the market requires. To go much beyond that would take longer. We feel we are in pretty good shape on capacity,” Ruiz said. He said there has been no change to the situation with the Luther Forest fab near Albany, N.Y., saying that AMD has “a window in the summer of 2009” to decide. “We look forward to being able to do it,” Ruiz said.
AMD spent $425M on capital expenditures in the fourth quarter, but is trying to rein in expenditures across the board to meet its goal of returning to profitability in the second half, which Ruiz said will happen in the third quarter.
With unit shipments in the first half of the year traditionally accounting for 45% of annual unit shipment, and the second half of the year the remaining 55%, AMD expects unit shipments to be sluggish in the first half of the year, said CFO Bob Rivet.
“The key to our gross margin expansion is new products across all of our product bands. That, and the 45 nm production, is what will get us in the $2B [per quarter] zone that we need,” Rivet said.
Ruiz added that AMD “is not going after unit share increases, though we want to make sure that our customers get what they need. We have seasonality and new products as the plus-minus issues.”
In the fourth quarter, AMD reported revenue of $1.77B, an 8% increase compared with the third quarter. For the year ended Dec. 29, 2007, AMD achieved revenue of $6.013B, a 6% increase from 2006. The fiscal 2007 net loss was $3.379B.
