Globalfoundies has announced that it is interested in acquiring Chartered Semiconductor, and since the Mubadala investment fund is backing Globalfoundries, it won’t be running out of money anytime soon. As such, we can expect that the deal will officially close sometime soon.

Chartered has voted in favor of the Globalfoundries takeover (note: ex-AMD fabs) as it can keep up with the demands of super high-performance customers like AMD on a CPU side and Nvidia and ATI on the GPU side. On the other hand, Chartered might be doing some legacy technologies.

For those who aren't familiar, Chartered Semiconductor is yet another fab in Singapore that produces a lot of chips and has 150 customers. Once it gets acquired by Globalfoundries, the move will create an 8,500-person company with 150+ customers.

Globalfoundries' Dresden Fab1 has already been converted to 45nm and it already does test production of 32nm. Chartered is saying that it has 40nm bulk ready, but as of yet it has not managed to materialize many orders. ATI and Nvidia, the biggest customers for 40nm bulk process are all doing it at TSMC. At this point, Globalfoundries has AMD as its big client and ST Micro will be another big one coming in 2010. There might be some additional clients that they cannot announce just yet. ARM is a technology partner, but ARM merely licenses and doesn't actually make any chips.

Chartered can focus on 65nm "advance technology" chips, especially with 35µm to 11µm to value added solution. These are the guys who are still running 90nm, 0.18µm and 0.35µm fabrications, something that both TSMC and Globalfoundries got rid of a lot time ago. Globalfoundries will definitely appreciate these customers, but once they acquire Chartered, we are quite sure that they will be deeply looking into public listing and getting away from AMD’s financial portfolio.