Texas Instruments to Have 45nm Chips Made at Foundries

Taipei, May 21, 2008 (CENS)--When Texas Instruments (TI) recently announced its plan to have its 45nm base-band chips and digital signal chips made at two silicon foundries next quarter, industry watchers believed Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC) would be the choice partners.

Industry watchers said such plans is significant for it is TI's first time to contract pure foundries to make its 45nm chips.

TI Senior Vice President Kevin Ritchie said his company would maintain the strategy of contracting foundries to make digital logic chips and would begin volume productions of its 45nm chips at two foundries in the second half this year. In the meantime, his company would test its 40nm and 32nm chips at the foundries. The company will turn out 32nm and 40nm tape-outs at year end and shift its logic chips to 32nm and 40nm process technologies next year.

TI decided to enhance collaboration with foundries since announcing it would not independently develop process technologies below 45nm node last year. Since then, the chipmaker has increased contracts for 90nm and 65nm chips to TSMC and UMC and begun co-developing 45nm process technology.

Chip-making equipment suppliers pointed out that TI had kept production of Sun Microsystem's 65nm Sparc microprocessors at in-house factories and planned to farm out the production of sub-45nm chips to TSMC at the end of this year.

TI has kept production of its 65nm DaVinci digital signal processors at in-house factories until recently, when it started delegating the production in small volume to TSMC. It will co-develop process technologies below 45nm nodes for the processors with TSMC.

TI has begun contracting TSMC, UMC and Chartered Semiconductor to make its OMAP chips for LoCosto and eCosto mobile platforms since last year, when it started shifting the chips to 65nm process. TI will likely farm out production of 45nm OMAP chips to TSMC and UMC in the second half this year.