The world largest contract chip maker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd (TSMC), has made a series of high profile moves recently. During last week VLSI Week seminar, Chairman of TSMC, Morris Chang, unveiled a new business model for foundry, known as Open Innovation Platform (OIP) that aims to shorten clients’ time to market and reduce their development and manufacturing costs (Ref). You can watch Morris Chang’s speech in the video below. Some people also aptly coined the new OIP model “Foundry 2.0″ which signifies the second generation of fabless-foundry model. Based on the OIP or Foundry 2.0 model, foundry will offer vertically integrated services to customers, from designing (design tools and IP) and manufacturing (traditional foundry service) to testing and packaging. Hmmm…Does it mean that fabless can just handoff their design RTL to the foundry, and they will get packaged parts from the foundry rather than getting only wafers? Anyway, TSMC hopes that through the new platform, it can establish a more extensive and deeper technical cooperation with its customers.

Besides the ambitious OIP initiative, TSMC is also aggressively developing its own silicon-proven IPs, such as embedded flash, embedded DRAM and embedded CPU, as well as pushing the envelop on process technology. According to Ref, TSMC’s 40G process will be in risk production at the end of this year and become quite significant next year, while its 32LP process is expected to ready by the end of this year. TSMC also announces that its 32HP will offer high-k/metal-gate option.

With CPU, GPU and chipset under one roof after the merger of AMD and ATI, AMD has been introducing a number of platform solutions integrating CPU, GPU and chipset for a particular niche market segment. For example, AMD launched the Puma notebook platform in May 2007, which consisted of Griffin processor and RS780 mobile chipset; the Spider platform for Game enthusiasts in Nov 2007, which consisted of Phenom processors, ATI Radeon HD 3800 cards and the AMD 7-Series chipset.
Yesterday, AMD announced the first commercial desktop platform, Business Class, which consists of native Phenom X3 or X4 processors, as well as Athlon X2 processors and a AMD 780V chipsets with optional ATI Radeon™ HD 3000 series discrete graphics (Ref). The platform also supports non-AMD graphics and chipsets. One prominent feature of this Business Class platform is the support for stability and longevity up to 24 months. The Business Class platform is also designed to take full advantage of the rich visual experience and enhanced productivity features of Windows Vista and enables businesses to upgrade when the time is right.