Stefan Mileschin

Because of its renewed focus on specialized process technologies and competition, GlobalFoundries has opted to reconsider its plans concerning its Fab 11 located near Chengdu, China. Rather than offer mature bulk fabrication technologies, the manufacturing facility will focus on FD-SOI and other differentiated processes. In addition, GlobalFoundries and its partners from China are now revising their timeline for the fab, removing parts of the project to accelerate straight into its second phase of deployment.

Fab 11 was/is built as a partnership between GlobalFoundries and the Chengdu municipality. The original plan for the Chengdu fab included two phases with an aggregated capacity of approximately 1,000,000 wafers per year when both operate at full capacity. The first phase was to start operations in 2018 and process around 20,000 wafers per month using mainstream 180/130 nm fabrication technologies originally developed by Chartered for various general-purpose chips. The second phase was to begin operations in 2019, use GlobalFoundries’ 22FDX process and gradually expand its capacity to 65,000 wafers per month. At the same time, one of the terms of the agreement between GF and the Chengdu municipality was to develop an FD-SOI ecosystem locally.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13637...consider-plans