Sun woos NEC for new MPU

Electronic News, Jan 15, 1996 by Jim DeTar

Mountain View, Calif.--Sun Microsystems is currently negotiating with NEC's ASIC manufacturing division in Japan to do foundry work for Sun on a next-generation, mid-range Sun UltraSparc chip that is currently under development.

Chet Silvestri, president of Sun's Sparc technology business, said the two companies have not signed a definitive agreement yet but are working out the details. Under proposed terms of the agreement, NEC will manufacture the part but will not have marketing or other rights. There will be no co-development efforts that would require exchange of personnel to each other's campuses, Mr. Silvestri noted.

Sun, a fabless company, passed over other current partners such as Fujitsu, in part because NEC has significant and growing 0.35 micron capacity. Mr. Silvestri said the 0.35 micron capacity was not the only reason that Sun selected NEC after about six months of discussions.

"We think we're getting an excellent, high-volume, low-cost manufacturing partner to supply the product we need.

"The reason we've selected them (NEC) is that, like anything else, every semiconductor manufacturer has their own roadmap and there is leapfrogging that goes on. We have an UltraSparc design derivative we really want to do. We've used a certain approach and we wanted someone to fit reasonably close to the style we liked."

Kenji Kani, vice president of the semiconductor group, NEC Corp. in Japan, commented "We are still studying the feasibility of doing this work for Sun, so we are unsure of when we shall begin shipments. However, we do not expect to be shipping to them before the second half of this fiscal year.

"The primary beneficiary (at NEC) is our ASIC group. The ASIC group is handling the work for Sun. Sun chose NEC because we have the best and most advanced 0.35 micron ASIC production capabilities. We have made the investment, we have the technology and we have got the experience over all our rivals, including Sun partners Toshiba and Fujitsu."

Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst for microprocessors at Dataquest, commented "NEC is fairly active in the MIPS camp and announced the R5000 recently (EN, Jan. 8). If NEC is going to work on Sparc, it raises the question will they continue working on MIPS. That's a lot of camps to have your feet in.

"A mid-range UltraSparc would make some sense (for Sun) because they have MicroSparc at the low end and UltraSparc at the high end. We're not talking huge volumes. If it's an embedded product we're talking relatively limited volumes." Mr. Brookwood noted that the new UltraSparc would be "right on top of where MIPS has the R4400 positioned, sitting on (network) hubs."

Mr. Silvestri said of current Japanese manufacturing partners Fujitsu and Mitsubishi, "It will not have significant impact on them." He emphasized that Sun is still committed to its current partners including its primary manufacturing partner, Texas Instruments, which has been selected to build the UltraSparc-2. "The lion's share of our product is supplied by Texas Instruments. That probably doesn't change in the future."

Mr. Silvestri said that Sun will not ship the product for more than a year. "The product is still in the definition stage. We expect to ship the product in calendar 1997. It will have a higher level of integration. We will take what is in the logic chipset and put it on the CPU to have a solution that will enable a lower-cost server or embedded computing device such as a switch or hub, or a high-end printer."

Although this will be the first time that NEC has done foundry work for Sun, he left open the possibility that NEC will also be used to manufacture other, future versions of the Sparc architecture. "It is possible as we build a relationship." Sun is not looking for any additional capacity beyond NEC at this time, according to Mr. Silvestri.

An NEC spokesman said the company will begin producing the new UltraSparc at its Kyusyu, Japan facilities and may eventually make the devices at its Roseville, Calif. site as conversion to 0.35 micron progresses there. The spokesman added that the agreement will not change NEC's strategy for its MIPS microprocessors or its own microcontroller/microprocessor lines.

Last summer, NEC announced it would construct a new production line for fabrication of 64-Mbit DRAMs on the grounds of NEC Hiroshima in an existing two-story structure using 0.35 micron design rule on 8-inch silicon wafers. That facility is now being upgraded to produce 16M DRAMs, according to the NEC spokesman, which will free other facilities' capacity for more specialized chips (ASICs etc.).