Clearly the key to success in the foundry business is partnerships. Easy to say, harder to do, here is an excellent example of one that works: GLOBALFOUNDRIES and ARM announced in August 2012 a multi-year agreement to jointly deliver optimized system-on-chip (SoC) solutions for ARM® processor designs on GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ 20-nanometer… Read More
Variation at 28-nm with Solido and GLOBALFOUNDRIES
At DAC 2012 GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Solido presented a user track poster titled “Understanding and Designing for Variation in GLOBALFOUNDRIES 28-nm Technology” (as was previously announced here). This post describes the work that we presented.
We set out to better understand the effects of variation on design at 28-nm. In particular,… Read More
GlobalFoundries Announces 14nm Process
Today GlobalFoundries announced a 14nm process that will be available for volume production in 2014. They are explicitly trying to match Intel’s timeline for the introduction of 14nm. The process is called 14XM for eXtreme Mobility since it is especially focused on mobile. The process will be introduced just one year after… Read More
A Brief History of GLOBALFOUNDRIES
In response to changing industry dynamics, AMD announced in October 2008 a new strategy to focus exclusively on the design phase of semiconductor product development. To achieve that strategy, AMD partnered with Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC) of Abu Dhabi to create a new joint venture company designed to become… Read More
The GLOBALFOUNDRIES Files
There’s a new blogger in town, Kelvin Low from GLOBALFOUNDRIES. Kelvin was a process engineer for Chartered Semiconductor before moving on to product marketing for GF. His latest post talks about the GF 28nm SLP which is worth a read. There was quite the controversy over this Gate-First HKMG implementation of 28nm that IBM/GF/Samsung… Read More
The GLOBALFOUNDRIES Value Proposition!
From the very start I continually asked the GF guys what their value proposition is other than, “We are not TSMC”, which seems to be the easy way to foundry riches but clearly is not. In the early days of GF there was a lot of pride, pomp, and circumstance but that does not necessarily sell wafers. Today we are seeing a very different GF … Read More
Re-defining Semiconductor Collaboration!
GlobalFoundries did a nice response to my “How has 20nm Changed the Semiconductor Ecosystem?” and redefined the word collaboration. Our industry is plagued with sound bites and acronyms so let us agree on a semiconductor ecosystem definition of collaboration.
Mojy Chianis senior vice president, design enablement at… Read More
Samsung, Synopsys, GLOBALFOUNDRIES and ARM at DAC
Tuesday morning at DAC I attended the Synopsys-hosted breakfast to hear from foundries and ARM about the challenges of designing and delivering silicon at the 32nm/28nm and 20nm nodes.
… Read MoreCollaboration at 28nm, 20nm and 14nm
Wednesday morning I attended a panel discussion with: ARM, IBM, Cadence, GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Samsung.
The panelists all sang the same song of collaboration between EDA, IP and Foundry to enable 28nm, 20nm and even 14nm.… Read More
Understanding and Designing For Variation in GLOBALFOUNDRIES 28nm
On Wednesday there is a User Track Poster Session that examines the design impact of process variation in GLOBALFOUNDRIES 28nm technology. For those of you who are wondering what process variation looks like at 20nm take this 28nm example and multiply it by one hundred (slight exaggeration, maybe).
Variation effects have a significant… Read More
Flynn Was Right: How a 2003 Warning Foretold Today’s Architectural Pivot