LONDON — The foundry business of Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. has poached the 40-nm business of fabless FPGA vendor Xilinx Inc. according report from financial management company Robert W Baird & Co.
Traditionally the two FPGA rivals, Altera and Xilinx, use different foundries. Altera has been with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (Hsinchu, Taiwan) SMC and has been pushing to get on to TSMC's 40-nm process with its Stratix IV FPGAs. Xilinx has worked with rival foundry United Microelectronics Corp. (Hsinchu, Taiwan).
In May of this year UMC was expected to ship its initial 45-/40-nm wafers by year's end. Xilinx's other foundry partner, Toshiba Corp., claimed to be in 45-nm logic production.
However, a jump to Samsung could indicate that 40-nm volume is expected to come quicker from Samsung or that Samsung is dealing aggressively on price to fill its fabs. Samsung is part of the Common Platform Alliance which sees three foundries IBM, Samsung and Chartered Semiconductor working on a common CMOS baseline process technology.
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