The transition to new production technological standards has always been a costly affair. For the purchase of new equipment required huge funds, not to mention the fact that an impressive amount required for the development and debugging of production lines. For semiconductor industry the limit was the 90-nm process technology. Apple was forced to leave Power processors to x86-compatible Intel processors . Also Fujitsu company began to translate their release of 90nm semiconductors on contract manufacturing by connecting to their release Taiwanese company TSMC.
Seeking to relieve the financial burden of problems in February, Fujitsu has decided to transfer the design and production of LSI in the hands of a joint venture by Panasonic. Thus, the division of Fujitsu Semiconductor will lose a significant portion of the semiconductor business. The next act will be selling a business in the development and production of micro-companies, as well as the related Spansion assets . The deal promises to be completed in the period from July to September this year. The price in question- $ 110 million for the business and $ 65 million for equipment and finished products.
Currently, the number of Fujitsu Semiconductor staff unit is 8,600. About 3,500 workers units will be transferred to the joint venture Fujitsu / Panasonic (BIS) or the newly organized purely manufacturing joint venture between Fujitsu and TSMC. The same joint venture will produce controllers and analog solutions developed now by Spansion. To do this, Spansion will move about 1,000 employees from Fujitsu. About 2,400 people will have to fired. Fujitsu Semiconductor division will remain 1,700 people engaged in service production.
After all these transformations, Fujitsu will be able to concentrate on their main areas - on the development of server products and SoC for smartphones. Spansion company , was organized in 2004 as a joint venture between AMD and Fujitsu to produce flash memory NOR-type. With the proliferation of NAND-flash Spansion company almost went bankrupt.