Date: 06/02/2013

Semiconductor tech update from Common Platform Technology Forum 2013

The mega semiconductor companies IBM, GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Samsung of "Common Platform Technology Forum" are continuing to collaborate on chip making innovations. These large companies are partnering to target the big pie of opportunity in IC industry created by growth of market for smartphone and such mobile electronic devices of mass consumption. At 14nm and below even a small improvement causes big impact on chip business. At this year's event "Common Platform Technology Forum 2013" the hot topic looks to be FinFET. The topics also include double patterning, co-optimization of both VLSI design and fab tech, and 3D IC fabrication.

Dr. Vassilios Gerousis, distinguished engineer and technologist at Cadence Design Systems joined by Dr. Mukesh Khare, director of Semiconductor Technology Research, and Dr. Supratik Guha, director of the Physical Sciences Department presented “Next-Generation R&D and Advanced Tools for 14-nanometers and Beyond.”

Here below are some of the news announcements at this event:

GLOBALFOUNDRIES in partnership with Adapteva is offering Epiphany IV microarchitecture to customers using GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ 28nm-SLP process technology. GLOBALFOUNDRIES says Adapteva is the first company to demonstrate a processor operating at 50 GFLOPS/Watt. While moving from 16 cores at 65nm to 64 cores at 28nm, Adapteva is said to have maintained overall power consumption at just 2 Watts.

The Epiphany IV microarchitecture is Adapteva’s latest design, including 64 high-performance RISC cores operating at up to 800MHz and is designed for use as low-cost and low-power co-processor for running massively parallel tasks in conjunction with an ARM or x86 CPU. GLOBALFOUNDRIES has also announced implementation of a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor using three-dimensional 14nm-XM FinFET transistors.

GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Cyclos Semiconductor announced plans to implement Cyclos’ low-power semiconductor intellectual property in ARM CortexTM-A15 processors using 28nm High-K Metal Gate (HKMG) process technology from GLOBALFOUNDRIES. Cyclos RCM IP reduces the power consumed in clock meshes, the clock distribution networks that have been used in high-performance processors for years. Cyclos employs on-chip inductors to create an electric pendulum, or “tank circuit,” formed by the large capacitance of the clock mesh and the Cyclos inductors.

Rambus will develop a range of high-speed memory and chip-to-chip serial link interfaces optimized for GLOBALFOUNDRIES processes, including the new 14nm-XM technology, which is the industry’s first 14nm offering based on a modular FinFET technology architecture. This new work will build on past collaboration on several 28nm test chips that demonstrate the capabilities of Rambus’ interfaces for both mobile and server-based applications.

Synopsys is offering its DesignWare Embedded Memory and Logic Library IP; design tools from the Galaxy Implementation Platform; and TCAD process and device simulation tools optimized for GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ FinFET tech, which combines a 14 nanometer (nm) FinFET device with elements of GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ 20 nm-LPM process to reduce risk and accelerate time to volume.

Cadence Design Systems has announced Samsung Foundry and GLOBALFOUNDRIES are providing SKILL-based process design kits (PDKs) for the newly introduced Cadence Virtuoso Advanced Node.

Volume production of chips at 14nm is going to happen in late 2013 or early 2014, or even earlier. The competition is between Intel, TSMC and the partners of IBM which mainly includes GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Samsung. Intel is slightly ahead of others in this high risk market of Billions of $s.
Author: Srinivasa Reddy N