GlobalFoundries’ 28nm Manufacturing Process Is Better than TSMC’s

We’ve discussed half a year ago about the benefits of using ultra processed FD-SOI wafers and how this could lead to huge reductions in power consumption reaching 550% according to research done by STMicro.

The French-Italian semiconductor company has done considerable research on the matter as the world’s largest FD-SOI wafer supplier is Soitec and this is also a French company with close collaborations with STMicro.

FD-SOI does an exceptionally good job at reducing the leakage power and mainly reducing power consumption for chips running at modest frequencies.

The interesting part is that FD-SOI is mainly about the wafer and adapting your manufacturing line to use FD-SOI wafers.

Using FD-SOI wafers brings considerable advantages to the technology and TSMC is using regular bulk 28nm wafers.

There are reports saying that GlobalFoundires has finally adapted most of its advanced manufacturing capacities to use FD-SOI wafers and there are other reports that say that even customers working with the ATIC opened foundry view its 28nm techno as being considerably better than TSMC’s.

We’ve just reported that China’s Rockchip is now working with GlobalFoundires on manufacturing its new ARM tablet SoC on the 28nm technology from the Dresden FAB.

The fabless Chinese chip designer strongly believes that contracting GlobalFoundries manufacturing services will give it an edge over MediaTek even when the Taiwanese chip giant will move to TSMC’s 28nm production.

Therefore we should expect some seriously modest power consumption from AMD’s future 28nm processors and APUs next Spring as well some significant frequency boosts, depending on the design decisions.