Collaboration with academia
We then heard from John Pellerin, the R&D director. He stressed once more how vital technology leadership is for GF and how dependent on the IBM alliance it is in seeking to achieve this.
Pellerin also highlighted another reason for situating Fab 2 near Albany: its College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE). It looks like New York state is hoping to create a collaborative environment between industry and academia along the lines of Silicon Fen in Cambridge around Albany and GF is an important piece of that jigsaw. Hence the grants and tax breaks being chucked at the project.
On a subsequent tour of CNSE it was clear that there are substantial R&D resources there that provide significant additional cost savings and efficiencies for GF and the IBM alliance. It's clearly also not short of a bob or two, as the CEO of CNSE - Alain E. Kaloyeros - earns around $700 grand a year and drives a Ferrari F430 Spider.
We were told that conventional lithography is reaching its limits and technologies like EUV (extreme ultra-violet) lithography will be needed for the 15nm manufacturing process and beyond.
The final speaker was Tom Sonderman, the VP of manufacturing systems. He's in charge of the logistics of manufacturing and is keen to demonstrate unique manufacturing efficiencies offered by GF.
He was keen to emphasise how much higher a proportion of the wafer starts are on the 45nm process in Dresden than at TSMC, and that he thinks GF's speed of response to customer queries will be a potential competitive advantage over TSMC.
