GlobalFoundries now has seven fabs and an eighth one under construction. They will compete against market leader Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) ? which has approximately $10.4 billion in annual revenues ? as well as companies with their own in-house factories like Intel.

The combined company employs approximately 10,000 people around the world, anchored by headquarters in Silicon Valley and advanced manufacturing operations in Singapore; Dresden, Germany; and a new leading-edge fab under construction in Saratoga County, New York. These sites are supported by a global network of R&D, design enablement, and customer support in Singapore, China, Taiwan, Japan, the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

GlobalFoundries launches with more than 150 customers across the semiconductor ecosystem, with plans to deepen existing relationships and to aggressively pursue new customers. Current customers include many of the world?s top fabless and fab-lite companies, such as AMD, Qualcomm, STMicro and IBM.

GlobalFoundries claims they are leaders for fabless chip houses

Dan Hutcheson, CEO of VLSI Research, said: ?Foundry customers have made it clear that they are looking for deep collaboration with their foundry partners as opposed to a contract manufacturing service.? With the ARM partnership and Qualcomm joining last week, GlobalFoundries prospects are very good. Qualcomm said they will begin shipping products from Fab1 (Dresden) by fall of this year.

GlobalFoundries shared with BSN* their latest roadmap

GlobalFoundries is introducing a new model for IDM (Integrated Device Manufacturing). This means more emphasis on collaboration between customers, engineers, and everyone involved on the fab side of the equation. In the past, most of the R&D was segmented so the customer would hand off a rigid set of specifications to the fab. Then, the fab had to go back to the customer and explain why that was the hard way to do things. The old-fashioned back-and-forth process took a lot of time.

Volume production of wafers should not be a problem with three big factories, which can make chips on wafers that are 300mm in diameter, either in the works or under construction. It has six more older factories which make chips on wafers that are 200mm in diameter. They claim their capacity is expected to expand to 1.6 million 300mm wafers annually by 2014. This will be supplemented by 2.2 million 200mm wafers annually, offering customers the full spectrum of foundry technology from mainstream to the leading edge, for a total of 5.8 million 200mm equivalents.

BSN* will ask a variation on an old business question: How does any company buy up another company and not get a belly ache? It is widely accepted that merging two companies is never easy. Accenture is a specialist studying this problem. They have over twenty years’ experience and have looked at over 400 mergers and acquisitions  
 
Accenture agrees with a February 2003 Harvard Business Review article which says the results for an acquisition are determined by what is set up at the beginning. The biggest factor which leads to failure is cultural differences between the companies.  
 
The same Harvard Business Review article says that in the first year of a merger or acquisition nearly 25 percent of the executives and other talented employees leave ? three times the rate for a similar company without a merger. In the second year, an additional 15 percent leave, which is twice the normal rate. This high departure rate continues for up to nine years after a merger or acquisition says Harvard Business Review.  
 
Thus, GlobalFoundries has a lot of managing to keep their multi-continent, 10,000 employee organization focused on their high-volume wafer production goals, all without the problems that TSMC has shown over the past several years in not meeting their chip fab roadmap goals.

If GlobalFoundries meets their goals, they should come out in a solid second place, and maybe even first place ? if, and only if, they do a superb job of managing everything at once