Intel, TSMC Atom manufacturing deal cools
Lack of customer demand has put a deal inked last year on hiatus between the two chip industry giants that was to have covered the porting by the Santa Clara, Calif-based chipmaker of its Atom processor CPU cores to the Taiwanese foundry's technology platform, the New York Times reported this week. This contrasts with TSMC's announcement last month that it was speeding construction of new fabs and capacity expansions at existing fabs to meet what it described as "urgent recent increases in customer demand."
By Ann Steffora Mutschler, Contributing Editor -- EDN, February 26, 2010
Lack of customer demand has cooled a deal inked last year between two chip industry giants – Intel Corp and TSMC that was to have covered the porting by the Santa Clara, Calif-based chipmaker of its Atom processor CPU cores to the Taiwanese foundry’s technology platform, the New York Times reported this week.
The agreement included processes, IP, libraries, and design flows and was an extension of an existing relationship between the companies that has seen TSMC make Intel chipsets and other products including NOR flash.
At the time, Intel said it believed with the TSMC collaboration it would be able to expand the availability of its Atom SoCs to a wider range of applications, broadening the market opportunities for Atom and accelerating deployment of the architecture through multiple SoC implementations.
Products that were to be manufactured through the agreement were expected to find adoption in embedded CPU market segments including MIDs, smartphones, netbooks, nettops, and AC-powered consumer electronics device.
Apparently however, the deal is not off completely as the NYT as reported that Intel believes the partnership is just on hiatus for the short term.
The news contrasts with TSMC’s announcement last month that it was speeding construction of new fabs and capacity expansions at existing fabs to meet what it described as "urgent recent increases in customer demand."
