The Chip Insider® – GlobalFoundries GTS25

GlobalFoundries Technology Summit: The day I spent at GTS25 was a nice retreat from this year’s trick-or-treat bag of geopolitical uncertainties. Innovation uncertainties center around questions of when and how big versus the geopolitical of what and how disruptive. Innovation adds lubrication, geopolitics adds friction… sand in the gears.

GF’s ‘what’ certainty centers around what Tom Caulfield first called “essential chips” a year or so back…. Few got the subtle difference. Think of an electronic system as if it’s a restaurant, and semiconductors like they are a grocery store. The leading edge is like the meat counter. No restaurant serves just meat… Essentially, GF's strategy was to be the rest of the grocery store. It shifted from being a strategic alternative to the dominant foundry to being complementary to it. So far, this strategy remains unchanged under the new CEO, Tim Breen.

When it comes to a systems view, COO Niels Anderskouv sees three megatrends centering around AI that GF slots into… That said, Silicon Photonics is much closer in, which is where Ted Letavic has been focused... these break into 3 categories of development … The conundrum is that there is no clear solution path, and it’s very customer/application dependent. That’s a perfect place to be if you’re a foundry with advanced packaging capability. But your capability must be …

Another big new thing was something called a “Hybrid Manufacturing Strategy” (HMS), which was laid out by Andy McCarthy of NXP. It differs from the old ‘fab-lite’ manufacturing strategy, which … The difference is that Andy’s HMS approach distances a company from the need to be a China or Trump whisperer. It lowers the downside risk of what’s being pulled out of the trick-or-treat bag of geopolitical uncertainties. Andy does this by … Growth and technology shifts are other problems Andy is trying to build resilience around... The semiconductor game is now about adding value, not reducing cost. Technology directions such as chiplets and photonics are much less predictable. Halloween is always coming in semiconductors. Andy’s Hybrid Manufacturing Strategy derisks the bad things, while helping to make sure NXP is always pulling candy out of the trick-or-treat bag with the help of GlobalFoundries.

"Cost is important... Value is decisive." – G. Dan Hutcheson