The folks at GlobalFoundries definitely aren’t sitting around twiddling their thumbs. AMD’s freshly spun-off foundry business has announced that it has teamed up with IBM, Chartered Semiconductor, Infineon, Samsung, and STMicroelectronics to develop a 28nm high-k metal gate, low-power bulk silicon process.
The process will purportedly enable chips with 40% better performance, over 20% lower power consumption, and 50% smaller die areas than those built with current 45nm tech. GlobalFoundries says the process will be a great match for wireless and consumer electronics applications, but it should also help the independent foundry firm “compete and win in the graphics business”—a market that has “embraced half nodes for some time,” it says.
GlobalFoundries provided a 28nm evaluation kit to select clients in December, and it made the kit available to the “general market” last month. The foundry tell us it plans to start accepting 28nm designs in the second half of next year, with production to follow “shortly thereafter.” 28nm production will take place at GlobalFoundries’ Fab 1 facility in Dresden, Germany.
Oh, and GlobalFoundries points out that it’s still on track to kick off 32nm production in the first half of 2010. As we saw a few months ago, the firm has a busy roadmap that spans silicon-on-insulator, bulk silicon, and high-k metal gate processes at the 32nm node.
