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Chip foundry GlobalFoundries (GF) has been talking up the 28nm manufacturing process for a while now and this is the year it's expected to deliver. With that in mind the former manufacturing arm of AMD has announced a new 28nm design solution, which will help companies designing SoCs on that process to get them ready for manufacturing quicker.
Just to remind you, the manufacturing process defines the dimensions of each transistor, and smaller transistors mean better performance in smaller packages at lower power envelopes. While this is desirable across all chips, it's especially so in the mobile devices sector, which aims for all day battery life at a minimum.
While PC processors are in the process of moving from 45nm to 32nm, pioneered by Intel. AMD's first Fusion chips are manufactured on the 40nm half-node, but the ones scheduled to launch later this year will be 32nm.
On the SoC side, the chips currently found in high-end smartphones will either be 65nm or, in the more recent ones, 45nm. TI's OMAP4 series will remain at 45nm, as will Samsung's Orion, but Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon will go straight to 28nm. Meanwhile NVIDIA's suddenly ubiquitous Tegra 2 is a 40nm chip and, presumably, Tegra 3 will be 28nm.
The thing is, of the fab-less SoC companies, most of them still use TSMC for their manufacturing, while Apple still uses Samsung for the A4. So the TAM for GF in the 28nm market is huge. Conversely if it doesn't convince some of these chip companies to defect, you'd have to wonder where its much-needed new customers are coming from.
"Many of the world's top IC designers are using our 28nm technology to deliver tomorrow's most innovative mobile and consumer devices," said Mojy Chian, SVP of design enablement at GF. "By collaborating closely with our partners in the EDA/IP ecosystem to provide a comprehensive 28nm design platform, we are giving customers confidence that their designs will be brought to life smoothly and in time to meet their critical market requirements."
In addition to introducing ‘the industry's first 28nm silicon-validated signoff-ready digital design flows', GF CFO Robert Krakauer revealed in a recent interview with Bloomberg that the company expects to double its capital expenditure in fabs and associated kit to $5.4 billion this year. That will put it on a par with TSMC and Intel, but still well behind Samsung, according to the story.
So this is a pivotal year for GF in the SoC market. It made some promising announcements last year, such as collaborating with Qualcomm over 28nm, but it needs to turn some of these into new customers. While Apple or Qualcomm would probably be bigger outright wins, getting NVIDIA would surely be especially satisfying for the former manufacturing arm of AMD.
