RCR sat down with GlobalFoundries’ head of technology communications Jason Gorss at the Common Platform Technology Forum in Santa Clara to get an overview of what smaller and smaller chips meant for smarter and smarter devices.
Gorss reiterated to RCR that the common platform GlobalFoundries shares with Samsung and IBM was helping to push development forward at a rapid rate with high flexibility for customers, who could now buy their chips from any fab in the alliance at a very reasonable cost.
Although several quarters behind Intel’s release of 32nm chips, the alliance says it has now delivered its 32nm offerings with great success and that 28nm is “right behind it.” 28nm, as Gorss explains, is a direct shrink of 32nm, though the fabs will have to put in rather a lot more work to get from 28nm to 20nm – the next indentation on the roadmap.
“We’re readying ourselves for 20nm,” Gorss told RCR, explaining that this would enable smartdevices to push through the 2GHz barrier for blisteringly fast speeds at low power.
Gorss added that GlobalFoundries customers had also expressed satisfaction with the amount of area scaling both itself and Samsung had managed to achieve, providing a rather sizeable die size advantage. This, said Gorss, translated into millions of dollars in savings for each customer.
Watch our interview with Gorss below to find out more about why High K metal gate proved so useful at 32/28nm to cut down on leakage, why the alliance is switching from a gate first to gate last approach at 20nm and what we can expect in the future:
GlobalFoundries' Jason Gorss talks 28nm and beyond
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