IBM Versus GlobalFoundries: A Lawsuit Instead Of The Power Chips Planned
Last week, IBM took its former foundry partner, GlobalFoundries, to court in a lawsuit that alleges, in essence, that the company promised to deliver Power9 processors based on 14 nanometer technologies and Power10 processors based on 10 nanometer technologies and had some issues with the former and never delivered on the latter.
Not only that, IBM’s lawsuit says that it never released GlobalFoundries from its from its promise to deliver a 10 nanometer chip, and when the company promised to shift to 7 nanometer technologies, IBM in good faith worked on developing Power10 chips for these processes and spent at least $188 million. And further, in the summer of 2018 the foundry – which was at the time an amalgamation of the old foundry operations of chip maker AMD, the IBM Microelectronics division it acquired, and the chip making operations of Chartered Semiconductor – decided not to go ahead with 7 nanometer process development at its Fab 8 plant in Malta, New York, where the Power9 chip and the System z14 processors based on 14 nanometer technologies are made.
GlobalFoundries stopped development on both standard water immersion lithography and more advanced (and difficult) extreme ultraviolet (EUV) processes, and that left IBM in the lurch for Power10 and presumably for Power11 and Power12, which would have been delivered in the 10-year period that the two decided to work together over when they inked their partnership in July 2015.
