In today’s car industry, every nanometer counts: just ask Tesla
A flurry of recent news stories provides a clear understanding of who’s who in the global chip industry… and the automotive sector.
GM has just announced an important long-term exclusive agreement with GlobalFoundries to produce semiconductors in the United States, which will mean expanding the company’s New York plant. The deal is also a victory for the Biden administration, which has been trying for some time to pass legislation to increase domestic chip production and thus avoid future problems such as the shortages that began in 2020 during the pandemic and lasted just over a year, leading to the closure of several automobile manufacturing plants.
So far, so good: a major automotive brand trying to secure the supply of chips to avoid shortage problems. But as always, the devil is in the details: who is GlobalFoundries? It’s the manufacturing company that emerged from the divestment of AMD when the latter opted to go fabless, and which is the fourth largest chip manufacturer in the world, with factories in Singapore, Europe and the United States. But what really makes GlobalFoundries interesting are its ten factories where the company manufactures chips ranging from 600 nanometers (0.0006 millimeters) to 12 nanometers, which it only manufactures at its Dresden plant.
