Samsung, GlobalFoundries Cooperation Growing
By David Lammers
GlobalFoundries and Samsung’s foundry operation are getting closer together, cooperating on development of a low-power, high-performance (LPH) offering and telling customers of their mutual commitment to second-sourcing capabilities.
Ana Hunter
The 28nm LPH was largely developed in Korea with a team of Samsung and GlobalFoundries engineers working together, said Ana Hunter, vice president of foundry at Samsung. The technology adds silicon-germanium and other stressors to improve the performance, Hunter said at the GlobalFoundries technology conference held in Santa Clara Tuesday (Aug. 30). She said the LPH process offers “20 percent more performance at the same leakage” compared with the 28nm low-power process.
Gregg Bartlett, senior vice president of technology at GlobalFoundries, said the 28nm LPH process “fills in a critical gap for mobile products that need a combination of power and performance.” It targets smartphones, tablets, and notebook computers, among others. GlobalFoundries said the process offers a 60 percent reduction of active power at the same frequency, or a 55 percent performance boost at the same leakage, compared with 45nm low power (LP) SoC designs.
The LPH process fits between the Super Low Power (SLP) offering and the HPP (High Performance and Low Power) transistor offerings. All of them use a gate-first high-k/metal gate module which is now in volume production in the AMD 32nm Llano processors being made in Dresden.
Samsung and GlobalFoundries are members of the Common Platform Alliance, which earlier included Chartered Semiconductor, now part of GlobalFoundries, as well as IBM. STMicroelectronics threw its hat into the Common Platform ring last year, saying its products could be made either at its own fabs or at the foundries within the Common Platform.
At the GTC 2011 in Santa Clara, GlobalFoundries Fab 8 general manager Norm Armour said Samsung and GlobalFoundries, taken together, will soon have more 28nm capacity than TSMC. Samsung has its S1 logic fab in Giheung, Korea and the recently expanded fab, S2, in Austin. Production at those fabs can be synchronized with the GlobalFoundries Fab 1 in Dresden, Germany and the newly built Fab 8 in Malta, N.Y.
While few customers have thus far used two different companies to make the same design, the GlobalFoundries executives said they are starting to gain support from some customers for the “Fab Sync” approach, which they said reduces risk.
In a statement, Jay Min, vice president of System LSI foundry marketing at Samsung Electronics, said the 28nm LPH process “will be the first semiconductor technology to truly eliminate the border between desktop computers and mobile devices.”
Bartlett said the LPH process includes a 1.0 V overdrive capability, as well as a SHVT offering to reduce leakage current. He said Samsung and GlobalFoundries have worked with ARM Ltd. to create library IP, including a Coretex ARM test chip that will be ready by the fourth quarter of this year.
Tags: ARM, foundry, GlobalFoundries, IBM, Samsung Electronics