14 DAY TRIAL // ARM and TSMC are moving quite fast to transition the former Cortex A15 processor core to the advanced 20nm production node and ARM has already established a process team in Taiwan that is expected to help with this move.
The design centre was opened in Taiwan's Hsinchu Science Park and it features a team of eight engineers looking at the deployment of ARM's IP on the advanced TSMC 20nm processes node.
According to Lance Howarth, ARM's Executive VP for Marketing, who was cited by the Electronic Weekly publication, the process team should get four additional members in the near future.
ARM and TSMC have already announced in mid-October the tape out of a Cortex-A15 processor built using TSMC's 20nm node so the centre will continue to get this device ready for mass production.
"The 20nm tape-out is a test vehicle," said Howarth, but "the expectation is that we're a year away from 20nm as a production technology."
Indeed, the tape out is just the first step in a very long process as in electronics design this term is used to describe the final result of the design cycle of a chip and means that the integrated circuit can be sent to the foundry for manufacturing the first physical samples.
The resulting samples will then go through a number of spins as the design is further refined to eliminate any potential flaws that made their way into the integrated circuit.
Most of this job will take place in the centre established by ARM in Taiwan and will focus on proving the “design flows, to verify the RTL and make sure it all works well on 20nm."
For the time being however, ARM is centering its attention on getting out Cortex A15 chips built using the 32nm or 28nm fabrication processes. "We expect A-15 to be sampling in the first half of next year, to be in full production in Q4 2012, and to be out in hand-sets by the end of next year," said Howarth.