ARM, GlobalFoundries to push 28-nm foundry process

SANTA CLARA: GlobalFoundries Inc. has announced their plans to get ahead in the 28-nm process era. The announcement came at the inaugural Global Technology Conference here on Thursday. The company is effectively following up on its earlier promise and taped-out a qualification vehicle based on ARM's Cortex-A9 dual processor, an EETimes report said.

The company is a relative newcomer in the foundry arena and claims that this is the industry's first device on a 28-nm process based on a high-k/metal-gate technology.

According to a CDR Info report, the company also announced plans to bring a new class of thin film storage (TFS) flash memory products to market on 90nm technology. The reports said the advanced technology may be deployed in Freescale microcontrollers (MCUs) targeted for applications ranging from consumer electronics and household appliances to medical devices and smart metering systems.

This ''Technology Qualification Vehicle'' (TQV), will allow the foundry to optimize its 28-nm process for customer designs, said the company’s senior VP of technology and R&D during a keynote. The jointly developed TQV reached the tapeout stage in August at GlobalFoundries Fab 1 in Dresden, Germany and was a part of a collaboration with ARM that was announced last year.

Silicon results are expected back from the fab in late 2010. The TQV will be based on GlobalFoundries' 28-nm High Performance (HP) technology targeted at high-performance wired applications. GlobalFoundries and ARM first revealed the details of their SoC platform technology in Q3 2009. The companies say the new chip manufacturing platform will enable a 40 percent rise in computing performance, a 30 percent decrease in power consumption, and a 100 percent increase in standby battery life when compared to the 40-nm technology generation.