ACADEMIA

TSMC Joins Long-Standing Sun and Texas Instruments Partnership for 45 Nanometer processors; Sun and TSMC Collaborate on OpenSPARC Program: Sun Microsystems today announced that it has selected TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) as its foundry partner for processors based on 45-nanometer geometry as well as future generations. Sun partner Texas Instruments (TI) will continue to test and package the 45-nanometer processors. "TSMC gives us leading process technology coupled with the economics scale of high volume and lower cost," said Dr. David Yen, Sun's executive vice president, Microelectronics. "TSMC is already fully engaged with engineers from both Sun and TI as we make this transition as seamless and as fast as possible," said Sridhar Vajapey, VP, Technology, Validation and Test, who heads the Sun team that selected TSMC. "TSMC, working with Sun Microelectronics as their foundry partner together with Texas Instruments, on this industry-leading technology is a tremendous synergy of strengths," said Jack Sun, vice president of R&D at TSMC. "This collaboration brings together all the ingredients to successfully design, test and manufacture some of the most complex chips in the world on TSMC's CPU-grade manufacturing process." "TI has had the pleasure of being a strategic partner with Sun for almost two decades and we look forward to working with TSMC to provide turnkey backend support for Sun's SPARC product roadmap," Hunter Ward, TI VP & General Mgr - Sun Business Unit. Driving OpenSPARC Adoption As part of today's announcement, both Sun and TSMC will collaborate to expand Sun's OpenSPARC program. In the first phase of the program the two companies will work together to expand the university outreach program in Taiwan. In addition to its existing university outreach program, TSMC has a large fabless customer base and a substantial number of large IP partners that will help expand OpenSPARC platform adoption. Through the OpenSPARC program, Sun has established six major universities as OpenSPARC Technology Centers of Excellence: the University of California, Santa Cruz; University of Texas, Austin; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Stanford University; and Carnegie Mellon University. Each Center of Excellence has a minimum two-year commitment, during which time they'll execute chip design research and course work based on Sun's chip multi-threading (CMT) design.