We had a chance to visit Globalfoundires and its Fab1, something that used to belong to AMD and that we used to know as Fab 30 and Fab 36. The part of the interesting day in this leading manufacturing facility, apart from the fact that Globalfoundries has electronic microscopes that cost more than 3 million dollars each and that they have million to one magnification, was to learn that to finish a single wafer it takes at least ten weeks.

This is what makes semiconductor industry so challenging, as you have to order your chips from the fab at least three months before you will need them. This kind of explains the graphics shortage, as if Nvidia and ATI ordered GT200 and additional RV870 chips in September, they might be there for November time, if not later.

The same goes for Intel and AMD when it comes to CPUs, but for some urgent cases there is a chance that Globalfoundries can get some limited number of wafers in ten to fourteen days, but this usually happens for new product tape outs and pilot production. If it’s really urgent, they will do a limited quick production for AMD, but we are talking about a small number of wafers.

Generally, you have to do some great planning to stay in the semiconductor game.