News for "22 nm"

GLOBALFOUNDRIES today announced it officially broke ground on the construction of Fab 2, a new semiconductor manufacturing facility located at the Luther Forest Technology Campus in Saratoga County, New York. Once completed, Fab 2 will stand as the most technologically advanced semiconductor manufacturing facility, or fab, in the world and the largest leading-edge semiconductor foundry in the United States. The construction and ramp-up phases for the new $4.2 billion facility are expected to take approximately three years to complete, with volume production expected in 2012.

"Semiconductors are the building blocks of technology innovation and are present in everything from mobile phones to kitchen appliances and solar panels," said Hector Ruiz, chairman of GLOBALFOUNDRIES. "As today's chip designers push the boundaries on the next generation of products, there is a growing need for a new approach to design and manufacturing rooted in collaboration and innovation. With Fab 2, GLOBALFOUNDRIES moves the semiconductor industry away from the traditional model of isolated regional development and into an era of global hubs of manufacturing and technology expertise."

In its effort to meet the ever-increasing demands of consumer technology, the semiconductor industry has long been preoccupied with smaller transistors and larger silicon wafers. While these are important tactics, opportunities for increasing efficiency, becoming more agile, and minimizing waste are often overlooked in manufacturing processes, according to Thomas Sonderman, vice president of manufacturing systems and technology at GLOBALFOUNDRIES.

At SEMICON West 2009, Sonderman is calling for a renewed focus on operational agility in the semiconductor manufacturing industry, particularly in light of increased pressure to move to processes based on 450 millimeter (mm) wafers.

GLOBALFOUNDRIES today described an innovative technology that could overcome one of the key hurdles to advancing high-k metal gate (HKMG) transistors, bringing the industry one step closer to the next generation of mobile devices with more computing power and vastly improved battery life.

The semiconductor industry is celebrated for overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds to continue the trend toward smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient products. Performed in partnership with IBM through GLOBALFOUNDRIES' participation in the IBM Technology Alliance, the new research is designed to enable the continued scaling of semiconductor components to the 22 nanometer node and beyond.

IBM and its chip development partners announced today that they've developed the first functional 22nm silicon fabricated SRAM cell. This puts them ahead of Intel, which had announced its technological entry into the 32 nm domain in September, 2007. SRAM is usually the first semiconductor device a chip-maker tests a new fabrication-process on, before working on microprocessors. These devices were developed and manufactured by AMD, Freescale, IBM STMicroelectronics, Toshiba and the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE). They were built in the conventional 6-transistor design and on a 300 mm wafer. This level of miniaturization made the SRAM cell shrink to a mere 0.1 sq. μm, compare this to the SRAM cells that go into making caches on the 45 nm Intel processors, 0.346 sq. μm.