ARM and TSMC tape-out ARM Cortex-A57 using FinFET process

Date: 02/04/2013
ARM and TSMC have taped-out ARM Cortex-A57 processor on FinFET process technology. The Cortex-A57 handles high-punch processing in compute intensive applications such as high-end computer, tablet and server products.

TSMC says ARM and TSMC’s collaboration produces optimized, power-efficient Cortex-A57 processors and libraries to support early customer implementations on 16nm FinFET for high-performance, ARM technology-based SoCs.

“This first ARM Cortex-A57 processor implementation paves the way for our mutual customers to leverage the performance and power efficiency of 16nm FinFET technology,” said Tom Cronk, executive vice president and general manager, Processor Division, ARM. “The joint effort of ARM, TSMC, and TSMC’s OIP design ecosystem partners demonstrates the strong commitment to provide industry-leading technology for customer designs to benefit from our latest 64-bit ARMv8 architecture, big.LITTLE processing and ARM POP IP across a wide variety of market segments.”

“Our multi-year, multi-node collaboration with ARM continues to deliver advanced technologies to enable market-leading SoCs across mobile, server, and enterprise infrastructure applications,” said Dr. Cliff Hou, TSMC Vice President of R&D. “This achievement demonstrates that the next-generation ARMv8 processor is FinFET-ready for TSMC’s advanced technology.”

The test chip was implemented using a commercially available 16nm FinFET tool chain and design services provided by the OIP ecosystem and ARM Connected Community partners.