14 DAY TRIAL // While Intel already introduces their 45nm CPUs this year and IBM alongside AMD plan to release such devices by 1H 2008, the quest for miniaturization continues with the 32nm stage. The development of the future 32nm transistors has been recently reconsidered through an agreement between IBM, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing and Samsung Electronics, along with joint-development alliance partners Infineon Technologies AG and Freescale Semiconductor.
The agreement empowers all allied partners to produce high-performance, energy-efficient chips at 32nm. Design, development and manufacturing processes will be conducted over the next 3 years. The 32nm technology will help power a wide range of future devices, from next-generation hand-held products to the world's highest performance supercomputers, benefiting research programs in fields such as medicine, communications, transportation and security.
The above-mentioned companies will tightly collaborate in order to deliver high-performance and low-standby power products. Their strategy guidelines include: a focus on low cost and minimum complexity while retaining performance leadership implementation of new materials such as high-k/metal gate, advanced stress engineering and extreme low-k films in the back-end-of-line (BEOL), improved immersion lithography techniques to achieve competitive density and chip size implementation of quality analog models for the digital communications marketplace designing a platform for derivative technologies such as RF CMOS and embedded DRAM, or eDRAM.
This kind of agreement is not the first one issued by the leading companies. According to Samsung, it is actually the forth node that will go on development under this joint model. The future 32nm cooperation outlines the prospects of an enablement package, similar to previous alliance developments. The resulting development package will support the most common design tools that will allow integrators to utilize the full potential of this advanced technology for their specific products.
32nm development activities are scheduled to begin at IBM's state-of-the-art 300 millimeter semiconductor fab facility in East Fishkill, N.Y.