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The Power.org initiative isn't the only move IBM is making to open up the way it builds semiconductors. For the past several years, IBM has participated with Chartered and Samsung in the Common Platform technology initiative, which has involved unprecedented sharing of technology and ideas among the three companies. Traditionally, once a customer had chosen a vendor to manufacture its chips, it was locked into that vendor and its chip fabs; but today, a company like Microsoft® builds its processors for its Xbox game system at both IBM and Chartered -- and doesn't worry about compatibility or eating up valuable design team resources. This is all managed by IBM and the implementation of the Common Platform.
It might seem counterintuitive to some in the industry that such sharing of information could boost the bottom lines of IBM and its partners in the Common Platform, but that's just what has happened. developerWorks talked with Steve Longoria, IBM vice president of Semiconductor Platforms, to find out how the Common Platform is good for IBM, its partners, its customers -- and ultimately the industry.
How did the Common Platform idea begin?
Steve: We started with Toshiba and Infineon back in the DRAM days, when feature sizes were 0.35 micron and larger. Fast forward that to where we are today, which is 90-nanometer technology, so we started a culture of joint development many generations ago.
As we went to smaller and smaller transistor geometries, we found that not only the design of the process, but manufacturing was becoming a much more significant challenge to our customers -- thus the need for collaboration across manufacturing boundaries. IBM is a leader in engineering, but we've made decisions on the scale in which we're going to manufacture semiconductors. So our client set had been frustrated with that. They love the IBM engineering, the IBM design, the IBM process capabilities, but their business requires higher volume and scale in semiconductor manufacturing than the IBM company is going to develop and deliver in the marketplace. So we originally teamed with Chartered to address that shortcoming. Chartered became our high-volume manufacturing entity to complement our engineering skills. And that's where this really started and how we teamed to satisfy Microsoft’s demands. Today we are expanding this open manufacturing approach with Qualcomm, where we are providing Qualcomm, one of our cell phone customers, complete technology and manufacturing solutions led by IBM and leveraging the capacity of Chartered and Samsung.
When did Samsung join the partnership?
Steve: Samsung signed up shortly afterwards, licensing the 90-nanometer technology jointly developed between IBM, Infineon, and Chartered. Samsung also licensed the design kits that we developed with it, and now Samsung is a joint development partner at 65 nanometers as well.
Common Platform membership means that you are practicing the jointly developed process, you are using the jointly developed design kits to implement that process in a design, and you are maintaining synchronization with the other member fabs, such that our clients can transparently source into all three of us. That's really how process development and manufacturing membership is defined. It's all about enabling clients to view the members as a virtual manufacturing source for silicon, where you can do a design once and release that design to all three factories and have it work.
We have demonstrated that capability now at 90 and 65 nanometers with chips for Qualcomm and are announcing that achievement today. We have a proven single design, three factories releasing that design and delivering first-time-right prototypes from all three factories within days of each other at both 90 and 65 nanometers.
Is this achievement without precedent?
Steve: Yes, this is unforeseen, undemonstrated in the industry. First time ever.
What do you see as the biggest obstacles in moving towards smaller geometries -- 90, 65, and 45 nanometers?
Steve: As we go down the curve of geometries, power is becoming a bigger and bigger problem and challenge, both for low-power applications and really any application where we have to deal with the leakage current differently than we've ever had to in previous generations.
Another thing is that there's a lot of buzz in the industry about this thing called DFM, or design for manufacturability. How you do a design and then create the rules to implement that design in manufacturing requires a lot of tuning, because at 45 nanometers, what you cut in a mask and what you print on your wafer are very different things. You're really dealing with wavelength now -- control of light wavelengths and other aspects that change the shapes of the transistors and the geometries.
So part of our collaboration has been to establish an open DFM forum and an open DFM flow between IBM, Chartered, and Samsung. Our competitors are attacking DFM in a closed sense where they'll just say, "Give us your design; we'll do everything internally and get your design to work." We are leveraging the best-of-breed DFM tool providers in the industry -- some start-ups, some big EDA companies -- and working collaboratively across all aspects of DFM from Chem-X polishing technology to critical area analysis to critical timing, embracing and establishing a large ecosystem around IBM's technology to implement DFM.
Has IBM given away technology to enable the Common Platform effort?
Steve: I would say it's more a matter of licensing and sharing. We are opening up access to how our fab works, and access to fab data and process data, deeper than we ever have before to enable this type of collaboration and offer better solutions for our clients. We see that we have to be more open, and we're actually leading the industry in opening up access to our data and our technology to ensure that our clients can get designs out that work.
So openness has helped IBM.
Steve: Well, what happens is that you become the technology standard in the marketplace, and then everybody wants to optimize their offerings to you. And then our systems business is able to take advantage of further optimization to IBM's base technology and stand on the shoulders of that, as opposed to the approach of others in the industry, which is to do everything themselves. We're seeing that with Cadence doing more optimizations around our technology base, which we then we take advantage of within the systems group and our design tool environment.
And the other thing I think that is a big twist for IBM is that as our semiconductor business grows, we get to apply a wholly different economic model than we would have five years ago. Then, we would have said, "Oh, we have to build another factory to support our growth." You would have had a whole different cost structure and approach to this. And now we're essentially operating in a bit of a "fab-lite" model, where our manufacturing is going to be done inside and outside, and we're not going to need to add capacity or capital expense on IBM's company books to grow this high-growth business. We are executing the Common Platform play today with outsourcing 20% of our semiconductor OEM revenue to Chartered. This is a model that will grow as our business grows.
And the financial results of our division within IBM have been huge. I mean, the growth is staggering. And how we're doing that is on the backs of this platform in which we're doing joint manufacturing with our partners. The Microsoft business is a direct result of the platform, and that's been the high-volume growth that's been contributing to our growth the last four quarters. We leveraged our partners' capacity for our own business growth with Xbox 360. In a given quarter, we build between 20% and 80% of those chips inside IBM, and then balance at Chartered to meet Microsoft's demand requirements. And we are scaling that to the rest of our offerings as we go out through time. So it works great for IBM as well. We're able to optimize our investments for our chip business around products, not around capacity. And we can leverage our partners' scales on capacity, and their cost structure on capacity.
What feature size are most new products implementing these days?
Steve: We are in the mainstream at 90 nanometers, and a lot of new designs are coming to us now at 65, and we're in deep discussion with clients on early 45-nanometer prototyping. There are two kinds of folks that are pushing for those sizes. One group is on the performance track, which is the games processors and graphics processors folks that want -- that need -- higher performance and to manage power down. The other group is the cell phone community that really needs to push low power and low cost and is looking to get more chips per wafer, so they're trying to go down to the smaller geometries to leverage this economic scale.
Did the EDA companies jump on the bandwagon when you went to them with the Common Platform initiative?
Steve: Yes, they embrace our model. The Common Platform manufacturing partners aren't going to just absorb the value of the ecosystem, but will also provide access to our semiconductor data such that our ecosystem members can have better offerings themselves. So, Synopsys, Mentor, Cadence, and all of these start-ups that are part of the rich web of EDA tools are all optimizing reference flows and tools to the Common Platform technology, because we're embracing them as opposed to our competition, which tends to have a more closed environment.
And they seek economic leverage here as well because the Common Platform for all of our ecosystem members represents a common process. And now they have three routes to market: IBM, Chartered, and Samsung. So it's a lower investment for them with expanded sales and marketing reach.
How do the customers benefit from this collaboration?
Steve: Well, when the customer wants to bring on a second silicon source, what they have had to do in the past was do a design with their first source, get that design proven, verified, and into production, and then they would have to take that design team and reuse it to now port that design, re-time it, re-verify it, and get it ramped and started in production at that second source. So you are consuming valuable design team resources.
The client only needs to do the design once now, and they don't have to hold their design team back to bring on a second source, but they can actually keep them working on the next design. They can release the design to one of the Common Platform partners, and we have built-in multisourcing capabilities. It's just a matter of releasing the design again and qualifying it in one of the other fabs. You still have to do the qualification effort, but you don't have to hold valuable design teams back to do that re-port of the design. You can actually move on to whatever next thing you want to do in your roadmap. Customers like it, because it enables them to accelerate their product roadmaps and be more competitive in the marketplace. They like it because they don't have to spend twice to bring up the second source.
So those are the things that resonate most with the partners. We demonstrated something else with the Microsoft program. In the first pass, IBM stumbled a bit on getting the design out; Chartered did not, and so Microsoft got its prototypes on schedule and delivered. Second tape out, the reverse happened: Chartered stumbled, IBM didn't, Microsoft got its samples and was able to stay on schedule.
Can you gauge the impact of the Common Platform on the industry since it has come into practice?
Steve: The industry is really watching, the consumers of semiconductors are watching. It's like, "Is this thing real? I love the value proposition. It sounds good, but can I count on it as opposed to the old way of dealing with one factory with one design? Because if I can, I'm going to love it." And to answer those questions, as of today we can point to Qualcomm, because that's exactly what they're saying: "I've used it, I did one tape out, I got samples from all three companies, and this model works. And I think this is the model of the future."
So the key next step for us is continued demonstration in the industry as a team and success in the marketplace. It's a challenge, and it requires daily focus. It's a bit like a marriage: through good times and bad we're staying committed to each other. And there will be tests as we go through, and we'll have to continue to behave as partners, and there will be the great times, like today with Qualcomm, in which we're high-fiving each other with new design wins.
But the economic forces are there that support appropriate, positive collaborative behavior. Without those, this wouldn't have the teeth that it has.
What does the future hold?
Steve: I expect we'll add another semiconductor company as another manufacturing partner in the advanced space. I expect we'll be extending our alliance through 2010 very soon. I think it will extend to at least the next generation of technology, and I don't see any reason why it won't extend further. I expect our ecosystem of IP providers and EDA providers will continue to expand. As we win more in the marketplace, more companies will want to join our team.
So the Common Platform is the wave of the future?
Steve: Yes. The wave of the future is this virtualization of manufacturing from a client perspective. And the value that that's going to deliver to the client, I think we're still on the front end of fully exploiting.
To learn more about the Common Platform technology initiative, please visit its new Web site (see Resources for a link).
Learn
- Visit the Common Platform Web site.
- Get an overview of the Common Platform from IBM.
- Find out more about Cadence's yield-aware reference flow, designed specifically for the IBM and Chartered 90-nanometer low-power Common Platform technology.
- This case study describes the collaboration between IBM and Chartered that helped Microsoft build the Xbox 360.
- The IBM 300-millimeter wafer manufacturing facility in Burlington, Vermont, was named Top Fab 2005 by Semiconductor International Magazine.
- Get custom: Contact IBM E&TS about custom-processor- or Cell- based solutions.
- Learn more about the Common Platform from Chartered's point of view, with this video illustrating the reaction of the company's partners.
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McLaren Harris is a long-time writer and public relations/communications specialist in the computer industry. He can be reached at mclh@comcast.net.
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