Apple Inc. has bought a wafer fab in North First Street, San Jose, Calif. from analog and mixed-signal chip vendor Maxim Integrated Products Inc., according to a Silicon Valley Business Journal report.
Apple paid $18.2 million for the 70,000 square foot building at 3725 N. First St. the report said, referencing public records.
In May 2015 ATREG Inc. (Seattle, Washington) announced it had been retained by Maxim to help with the sale of its 200mm R&D fab there. ATREG described the fab as being suitable for prototype, pilot, and low-volume manufacturing and as a platform to strengthen U.S. based customers with strategic partners.
The unit was described as operational and included 197 pieces of chip manufacturing equipment from such makers as Applied Materials, Hitachi, Novellus, Tokyo Electron, KLA and ASML suitable for production at nodes from 0.6-micron down to 90nm, with the bulk at 0.35-micron to 180nm.
Apple's fab is immediately next door to an office building belonging to Samsung Semiconductor.
Apple is unlikely to use the fab for production of its main chips, for which it uses foundries TSMC and Samsung, but could use the facility for R&D in other components such as mixed-signal devices, MEMS and image sensors and for work on packaging.
What could they be making on such a (relatively) large process? As I understand it, prototyping on a large process doesn't really translate in to something useful for a small process does it?
Agreed. Maxim Integrated is an analog/mixed-signal company; it's completely the wrong kind of facility for digital logic production. Plus it's far too small, even for a test fab.It's an R&D lab, possibly to try some designs out but also for the car.
They also really need some private R&D. Rather than having test chips made at TSMC or Samsung for others to look at. When mass production starts its too late, but if you need a good year in advance to fix issues and tune the chip. Then its a problem.
We all know how Samsung works for example.
Why do you think glofo hardly matters?Plenty of companies run small fabs at older nodes for their own specialty purposes, but none of them could be used for mass market manufacturing. I agree with the article's conclusion, I would guess Apple wants to research doing some in-house mixed-signal stuff.
As far as speculating about Apple developing their own fabs: Even if Apple decided a few years ago to pursue their own bleeding-edge digital fabs, the plan would still be many years away from coming to fruition. Can't see any reason they'd go down that route, absolutely no return on investment even in the long run IMO.
In fact, I would venture a guess that in 5 years there might only be 2 leading-edge fabs (for digital logic) left. We're already down to 3, GloFo hardly counts at this point.
Why do you think glofo hardly matters?
Trying to understand your pov, and I don't quite understand your response.Because they haven't shipped a product on a leading edge node in how long?
Very interesting, but also kind of curious. Apple has always had the philosophy of "focus on your strengths". This is way out west of their traditional areas.
Then again, so was CPU design and we know how well that ended up. Also, the buying of the facility is really peanuts. This is probably a test balloon to see how well they use this facility.
They got it for a song and now they're FABulous!
Trying to understand your pov, and I don't quite understand your response.
You say that but in what context are they irrelevant. Just saying it doesn't help me understand.What's there to understand? Glofo is as irrelevant as AMD is. Even their owner is trying unload them.
You say that but in what context are irrelevant. Just saying doesn't let me understand.