By David Lammers

I had an interesting call with Mike Fujimoto and Tom Mesch, (tom.mesch@globalfoundries.com) two GlobalFoundries recruiters charged with finding research and engineering talent.

GlobalFoundries recently joined the Imec consortium, and the foundry is hiring about 12 researchers this year and another 12 next year for assignment to Imec, as well as transferring some people internally to Leuven, Belgium.

“These are the people working on technologies that we will be implementing in our Malta fab in a few years. They will do the development at Imec and be on a return path to work on-site in Malta, New York,” said Mesch.

Mesch said GlobalFoundries is seeking a senior manager to direct a group focusing on modeling and characterization, and a program manager to coordinate a group of engineers working on device, material, and memory-related research projects.

Also, the company seeks a director of pathfinding research engineering who will be responsible for delivering N+1 technologies from a less mature research phase to a ‘ready-for-development’ maturity,  and a senior manager of exploratory research who will lead a group working on “n+2” technologies.

The GlobalFoundries site at Dresden, Germany also has positions open for people working on the foundry’s advanced technology needs there, he added.

Travis Bullard, a GlobalFoundries spokesman based in Saratoga Springs, said the company is “recruiting across a spectrum of different needs,” including researchers, fab technicians and operators, and others. The company employs 450 people today in the Saratoga Springs, N.Y. area, and plans to have 900 people at Fab 8 by the end of the year, and 1,400 by the end of 2012.

GlobalFoundries plans to do initial production at Fab 8 by the middle of 2012 and  ramp to volumes in 2013, with 60k wpm as the projected full capacity. “For fab 8, it will take some time to get to the 60,000 wafers per month level. That includes phase one and phase two at Module 1,” Bullard said.

Bullard said many of the people hired to work at the Malta fab are being sent to Dresden for training, while a few others have gone to Singapore, in preparation for operations in New York. “We are doing a lot of hiring before the tools are installed, sending them to Dresden and Singapore and then relocating them back here over the next few months as we get tools installed at Fab 8,” he said.

Activity is beginning to recruit staff for the planned fab at Abu Dhabi, where groundbreaking on Fab 9 is expected as early as next year. GlobalFoundries has hired the M&W group to do the initial programming work in Abu Dhabi. The first step in Abu Dhabi is set up a design enablement (DE) group with about 100 people, said Fujimoto, who has worked in recruitment in the semiconductor industry for two decades. Already, about 100 young people from Abu Dhabi have completed internships in Dresden, he added.

“We don’t have much information here in Sunnyvale about the Abu Dhabi hiring. It’s probably a little bit early, but we will be recruiting for engineering jobs sometime soon,” Fujimoto said.

For the technology directors and senior scientists needed for the Imec project, Mesch said finding people with advanced degrees and experience in process technology is doable, but not easy. “It’s a competitive marketplace. People are out there, and there are plenty of companies which employ these kinds of people outside of the joint development alliance,” he said.

GlobalFoundries is a core member of the IBM-led joint development alliance, with operations in Fishkill and Albany, N.Y., and people from the alliance operations are off-limits. “We are not going to approach any of the people from another JDA company that we have met as part of the JDA. That is not the way we do things,” he said.

Fujimoto said GlobalFoundries plans to hire more than a thousand people each year for the next several years. The technology organization is roughly a quarter of that, with the other big group being manufacturing and facilities operations.

The consolidation in the chip industry has affected recruitment for people capable of doing technology and process-related R&D. “The pie has gotten so small. Fifteen or twenty years ago there were about 20 companies doing technology research. Because so many companies have shifted to a fabless or fab lite model, it has limited the number of companies doing technology research,” Fujimoto said.

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