Comment by jecel
3 months ago
My own memory of the events (which might be very wrong) was that a new vice-president of IBM semiconductors decided to drop bulk CMOS and focus exclusively on SOI (Silicon On Insulator). That suddenly left Transmeta without chips to sell. They had to scramble to find a new supplier and design their next generation processor for it (since the Crusoe wasn't portable to any other fabs). They were able to launch their Efficeon on TSMC 130nm (with a later version on Fujitsu 90nm) but the gap in supply was far worse for a startup than it would have been for a big company.
Backwards. The incompetent Transmeta board picked a VP from NVIDIA to be the CEO and his first action was to kill the IBM contract and move to TSMC, and forced TSMC to use a new unqualified process. This left us without chips to sell for over a year and notebook venders were furious and never returned.
This is what killed Transmeta, not all the technical details.
Thank you for correcting me. I don't know where I heard the story I mentioned.
That doesn't make any sense. IBM is the last company that would shut down a fab with no warning, breaking a bunch of contracts.