The semiconductor industry has a flow of breakthroughs

Jul 14, 2015 09:44 GMT  ·  By

On Monday, GlobalFoundries introduced its family of fully-depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) manufacturing technologies to customers seeking high performance and low costs.

Apparently, GlobalFoundries wanted to keep competitive prices for its future products imitating FinFET performance in a non-14nm form factor. The new process technologies have to deliver performance of next-generation technologies equipped with finFET transistors, but at costs comparable to those of existing processes.

Even though its new family of process technologies will be called 22FDX, it will offer four processes made for all sorts of applications, it has nothing to do with the 22nm production process commonly found at Intel.

The 22FDX uses back-end-of-line (BEOL) interconnect flow of STMicroelectronics’ 28nm FD-SOI as well as front-end of line (FEOL) of STM’s 14nm FD-SOI. The 22FDX sports 50% fewer immersion lithography layers than foundry FinFET technologies, and it doesn't require double patterning which makes simpler chip design. The 22FDX has also apparently 20% smaller die size than the 28nm.

Money is not saved only on eliminating double patterning but also by being a planar technology, allowing smaller companies to develop 22nm FD-SOI using 16nm or 14nm FinFET processes.

Customized process technologies will be made available

According to GlobalFoundries, the new 22FDX platform enables software-control of transistor characteristics to achieve real time tradeoff between static power, dynamic power and performance. This platform consists of a family of differentiated products architected to support the needs of various applications:

22FD-ulp: for the mainstream, and low-cost smartphone market with ultra-low power consumption as an alternative to FinFET.  22FD-uhp: For networking applications with analog integration, this offering is optimized to achieve the same ultra-high performance capabilities of FinFET while minimizing energy consumption.  22FD-ull: The ultra-low leakage offering for wearables and IoT delivers the same capabilities of 22FD-ulp, while reducing leakage to as low as 1pa/um. 22FD-rfa: The radio frequency analog offering delivers 50 percent lower power at reduced system cost to meet the stringent requirements of high-volume RF applications such as LTE-A cellular transceivers, high-order MIMO WiFi combo chips, and millimeter wave radar.

It most likely seems that the acquisition of IBMs Microelectronics department has helped in a way for this new breakthrough to be available. As IBM itself has also made a major breakthrough in developing 7nm process technologies, GlobalFoundries wants to impose its homemade FD-SOIs, which are much cheaper to mass produce, over the entire semiconductor industry.

PDKs and design kits are available now with risk production starting in the second half of 2016. Mass-produced 22FDX chips are to be expected in 2017.

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