ST to pull out of IBM Alliance for process technology

STMicroelectronics is pulling out of the IBM Alliance for semiconductor process technology and is now, apparently, without a source of core CMOS technology.“Our agreement with IBM provides us the right to end the participation in this Alliance under certain conditions,” says Jean-Marc Chery, COO of ST, “and we made the decision during the quarter to exercise those rights. Today, we are in discussion with IBM to plan for a smooth wind-down of our participation in this Alliance.”

The Common Platform Alliance develops core CMOS technology. Participants are Samsung, GloFo, ST and about 20 other companies. There have been question marks over the future of the Alliance ever since IBM sold its chip business to GloFo last year.

“We’ll continue to focus on our differentiated processes like CMOS FD-SOI for 2014, NF-SOI, embedded non-volatile memory for microcontroller and specialized camera sensor, our FlightSense and BiCMOS and Photonics,” says Chery.
Differentiated processes are all very well but it’s the core technology on which those differentiated processes depend which the IBM Alliance supplied to ST.

Asked where ST will now obtain its core CMOS technology, the usual company PR sources remained schtum.

The most likely sources of future process technology for ST are Samsung, with whom it has a licence agreement on FD-SOI, and GloFo.

Imec, is another possible source of CMOS process technology though ST has not joined Imec programmes in the past, and Imec does not do development work on FD-SOI.