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
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
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
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
As a fitting postscript to my “Brief History of the Fabless Semiconductor Industry”, semiconductor research company IC Insights compiled a list of the top semiconductor companies for the first half of 2012. As the traditional IDMs go fabless and sink in the ratings, the foundries post record gains led by TSMC at 22%, GlobalFoundries… Read More
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
Qualcomm has a nice problem to have: too much demand for its Snapdragon and 4G LTE baseband parts. How Qualcomm realigns its manufacturing strategy around this problem will determine whether or not they can breakaway from the ARM camp and go toe to toe with Intel. Last week Malcolm Penn claimed TSMC was too big to fail. Really? The … Read More
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
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
The introduction of 28nm high-volume production for IC semiconductor devices will usher the era of “extreme low-k1” manufacturing, i.e. the unprecedented situation in the long history of the silicon technology roadmap, where computationally intensive (and EDA-driven) Design-Technology Co-Optimization will become the… Read More
