Monday, May 12, 2008

Technologies from ATI

After the takeover of ATI, AMD restructured some of the product lineups from both companies. Some products were being rebranded under the AMD brand, including the Imageon for mobile phones and handheld devices, the Xilleon for consumer electronics (digital TV sets), ATI Xpress chipsets (to AMD chipsets) for AMD processors platform and GPGPU computing line-up FireStream, previously known as AMD Stream Processor. Some others retained the use of ATI branding, including the Radeon line of graphics, and chipsets for Intel processors.

Production and fabrication

Only real men have fabs.
Former AMD CEO Jerry Sanders, III,[27]

AMD produces their own processors in wholly owned semiconductor Fabrication Plants, called "FABs". AMD uses a "FAB x" naming convention for their production facilities, where "x" is the number of years that have passed between the founding of AMD and the date the FAB opened.

At their Fabrication facilities, AMD utilizes a system called Automated Precision Manufacturing (APM). APM is a collection of manufacturing technologies AMD has developed over their history (many of which AMD holds patents for), which are designed to enhance the microprocessor production process, primarily in terms of yield. Much of APM is related to removing the "human equation" from the manufacturing process by isolating in-process wafers in containers that are only exposed to clean room facilities. AMD claims that the technologies that combine to make APM are unique to the industry and make it the foremost semiconductor manufacturer in the world - a fact which is lent some credence by their current agreement with Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing based in Singapore. India's first Fab City, a silicon chip manufacturing facility, being setup with an investment of $3 billion by the AMD-SemIndia consortium.

AMD currently has a production agreement with foundry Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing which allows Chartered access to AMD Automated Precision Manufacturing (APM) process technology, in exchange for which Chartered will act as extra production capacity for AMD.

Through the acquisition of ATI, AMD also has manufacturing agreements with TSMC to produce ATI's lines of graphics and chipset processors. It is currently unclear how much of ATI's manufacturing needs will be moved to AMD's own fabs and how much will remain outsourced to other foundry companies, but AMD has announced plans for future processors to be outsourced to TSMC, while coincidently TSMC had announced it had received orders to fabricate x86 processors.

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