AMD’s plans to spin off its manufacturing operations as the Foundry Company received an unexpected blow this week from the man who more or less single-handedly created the concept of chip foundries.

Foundries take designs from firms such as Qualcomm and Nvidia, and create chips, allowing the so-called fabless firms to avoid spending small fortunes on creating leading edge factories.

But at a Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) dinner earlier this week, Morris Chang, who formed the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in 1987, criticised AMD’s plans to use a future fab in New York State and an existing one in Dresden, Germany, as the basis for the Foundry Company.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Chang received the highest gong the SIA could offer – the Robert N. Noyce Award – from the fair hands of Hector Ruiz, the chairman of AMD.

While Chang rather gracefully accepted the gong from Ruiz, and said he never ignores competitors – which the Foundry Company will be, he predicted problems ahead for such a foundry.  Last month, AMD's CEO Dirk Meyer (right) said that creating the Foundry Company would relieve the firm of the capital burden of constantly building new fabs.

He said, according to the Journal, that the Foundry Company will be too far away from both suppliers and customers and if he was going to build new factories they wouldn’t be in either Germany or New York State.

The Journal, unfortunately, did not record the look on Hector Ruiz’ face at these comments. But perhaps Ruiz doesn’t care, because he’s set to collect a super duper bonus when the Foundry Company comes into being.  X