No names mentioned? Also why can not this company switch to tmsc or gf?
The fact that the article teases an industry going through change makes me think it's probably a company that produces things for 5G. My money would be on Nokia.
When a chip design is stable enough for manufacturing them. But chips usually have post si bugs and so the tape out is usually a back and forth process depending on how complex thechip is and how competent the design team was.
tldr this article is basically saying the 10nm is so screwed up they can't just adjust a few things, they need to fix a lot and the more changes you start having to make the more verification that needs to be done before things are signed off and ready for tapeout.
They certainly can go to TMSC or GF with their designs but it will take time (months or years) to validate the designs, and money to make it happen. And this doesn't even take into account Fab capacities. TMSC and GF might be committed to other firms and not have capacity for this new work.
The 5G rollout has already started and vendors should have been shipping their products by now. Not having anything for the first wave means you're going to lose most of the market.
I suppose the worst case would be an expensive R&D initiative (with ARM paying Intel for prototypes) about how to make ARM cores with Intel's 10nm process, with no usable result. Not likely to sink ARM.
ARM doesn't sell silicon, they license IP. However might be they're licensing IP blocks. Essentially a tested CPU layout you can more or less paste into a design. Think Lego's.
"ARM, challenging Samsung, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and GlobalFoundries in the mobile SoC fab space."