Jan 14, 2011 10:14 GMT  ·  By

Globalfoundries has just introduced its new 28nm digital design flows which will help companies, developing SoCs based on this process, get them ready for manufacturing a lot quicker, effectively reducing their time to market.

According to the company, traditional foundry design flows have not taken into account the growing interaction of design and manufacturing at advanced technology nodes.

However, they have addressed these issues by strengthening their collaboration with providers of EDA software and IP to validate design methodologies against real silicon.

In addition, the company's silicon validation model is far better than the standard Design Rule Checking method used by most other manufacturers as it relies on two dimensional shape-based pattern-matching to enable up to a 100-fold speed improvement in identifying complex manufacturing issues.

"Many of the world's top IC designers are using our 28nm technology to deliver tomorrow's most innovative mobile and consumer devices," said Mojy Chian, senior vice president of design enablement at Globalfoundries.

"By collaborating closely with our partners in the EDA/IP ecosystem to provide a comprehensive 28nm design platform, we are giving customers confidence that their designs will be brought to life smoothly and in time to meet their critical market requirements," concluded the company's rep.

At first, the 28nm manufacturing process will be used for producing SoCs (system-on-chip) and other such chips, but, eventually, the process is going to be used for more complex parts, such as GPUs and CPUs.

For example, AMD plans to use it for the upcoming Radeon HD 7000 family of graphics processors.

All GlobalFoundries' 28nm technologies employ the Gate First approach to HKMG, which should deliver improved power efficiency when compared to other foundry technologies.

To get ready for the introduction of the 28nm manufacturing process, Globalfoundries has recently announced that it plans to invest $5.4 billion in 2011 for expanding its production facilities.