[The Exiled]

GlobalFoundries gears up for the next generations of chip manufacturing

GlobalFoundries, born out of AMD's manufacturing arm many moons ago, made a statement last year when it served as the sole source for AMD's Ryzen and Epyc CPUs and a wide range of Radeon GPUs. Now that 14-nm LPP is a mature process, GloFo is looking toward the future at its Fab 8 manufacturing facility in upstate New York. 7-nm Leading Performance, or 7LP, is the company's next major stop on the road towards the limits of silicon, and that process may eventually mark one of the first times we'll see the use of extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) in the mass production of semiconductor products.

GlobalFoundries chief technology officer Gary Patton and Fab 8 general manager Tom Caulfield are optimistic about the prospects of EUV. The technology won't make or break the production of 7-nm chips, for one. Pinning the fate of an entire process on the capabilities of a single tool just isn't practical when one owns a monster fab that needs to be producing chips around the clock, every day of the year. Even as Fab 8 gears up for production on GlobalFoundries' most cutting-edge process, the company has plenty of other irons in the fire. Fab 8 has likely been producing large numbers of AMD's second-generation Ryzen processors on the 12LP process ahead of those parts' introduction next month, and we'll hopefully get a sense of just how those chips perform soon. If you see "Diffused in USA" laser-etched onto one of the heat spreaders of those chips, you'll know that they came from the forges of this fab.

Izvor: The Tech Report