The new Technology Development Center (TDC) will span 565,000 square feet over three stories, which will also include a 90,000 square foot clean room to help bring new technologies from research to development and ramp them into volume production.
TDC will create about 500 new jobs. GlobalFoundries also confirmed that it will be hiring 500 additional employees for its other manufacturing facilities in Malta. When TDC goes online in late 2014, the company expects to employ about 3,000 people at the Fab 8 campus. Construction of TDC will begin in spring of this year.
According to GlobalFoundries, TDC's goal is "to provide a collaborative space" to develop "end-to-end solutions covering the full spectrum of silicon technology, from new interconnect and packaging technologies that enable three-dimensional (3D) stacking of chips to leading-edge photomasks for Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography and everything in between."
As GlobalFoundries is trying to attract business to manufacture ARM-based processors, an on-site R&D fab should be able to create an ability for the company to keep the manufacturing evolution pace of especially Intel and Samsung and create incentives for customers to contract GlobalFoundries as a chip manufacturer.
