About GlobalFoundries
GlobalFoundries is a contract chip manufacturer, or foundry, which makes chips designed by other companies rather than selling its own. It focuses on specialty processes such as FD-SOI, embedded MRAM and silicon photonics rather than the smallest leading-edge nodes. It was created in 2009 when AMD divested its manufacturing arm, and it listed on Nasdaq in 2021. The Mubadala Investment Company, a sovereign wealth fund of the United Arab Emirates, owns about 82 percent. Its headquarters is in Malta, New York, beside its main US fab, and it also operates plants in Dresden and Singapore.
GlobalFoundries was founded in 2009 and is based in Malta, NY, United States. It is listed under Custom Silicon, Photonic Computing, Interconnect & Networking.
Compute Technologies
- Custom Silicon
- Photonics
What GlobalFoundries works on
Custom Silicon
Custom silicon means a company designs its own chips for its own products or data centers instead of buying standard parts. The chip is made by a foundry such as TSMC, but the design belongs to the customer.
Photonic Computing
Photonic computing uses light instead of electricity to carry or process information. Photons have no charge, so light in a waveguide does not cause the resistive heating that current in a wire does, though lasers and modulators still use power, and many wavelengths can share one waveguide. The industry has two quite different parts: moving data with light, and computing with light.
Interconnect & Networking
Interconnect is the set of links that move data between chips, between boards and between racks. It includes wires on a package, cables inside a server, and the network switches and optical fibre across a data center. A processor is only as useful as the speed at which it can get data in and out.
Also in United States
Coherent, II-VI/Finisar (now Coherent), Celestial AI, Lightwave Logic, Rambus
