The chip manufacturing plants, access to IBM's proprietary technology and IBM engineers are being acquired by GlobalFoundries, a custom chip manufacturing company funded by the investment arm of the Abu Dhabi government in the United Arab Emirates and based in New York's so-called Tech Valley.
IBM will not be paid, but will pay $1.5 billion to get rid of this loss-making division - losses estimated at $1.5 billion a year. In addition, under a 10-year agreement, GlobalFoundries will supply Power chips to IBM in exchange for access to its technology, including Silicon on Insulator.
The news was reported by Bloomberg on Sunday night and later by the Wall Street Journal. IBM issued a statement announcing the imminent release of "big business news" on Monday, when it will also publish its quarterly financial results.
- Indeed, the news was confirmed by IBM on October 20: IBM Microelectronics' Global Commercial Semiconductor Technology division is being transferred to GlobalFoundries, which will now be IBM's exclusive supplier of server processor technology (22nm, 14nm and 10nm) for 10 years. The agreement allows IBM to further focus on research and development of the cloud of the future, mobile and big data analytics, as well as secure transaction systems. IBM's five-year commitment to invest $3 billion in microprocessor technology research, to which GlobalFoundries gains access, remains in effect.
GlobalFoundries was founded in 2009 after a strategic agreement with AMD - whose factory it operates in Germany - and is part of the Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC) of the Mubadala Development Company, which is owned by the Abu Dhabi government.
Today, GlobalFoundries is considered the second largest chip manufacturing plant in the world based on its revenue. It has manufacturing units in Dresden, Germany, Singapore, as well as in Malta, in the Saratoga area near IBM's factories in New York, with 13,000 employees serving 160 major customers around the world.
IBM had been collaborating with GlobalFoundries for years and in 2012 had commissioned the latter's factory in "Tech Valley" in New York to manufacture chips based on IBM's Silicon on Insulator technology.
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Did you know that: Thanks to CMOS 9S technology known as silicon-on-insulator (SOI), in 2001 the performance of transistors increased by up to 35%, as their insulation was now such that the flow of current (the voltage of which "draws" the 0 and 1 of the data) in the chip's circuits occurs without interference.
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IBM has sold its manufacturing division since the IBM PC in 2004, and recently also ceded its x86 server division to China's Lenovo in another historic deal. The Blue Lady will focus its efforts on cloud computing and the powerful Watson
Source: tech.in.gr
