According to GloFo senior VP Mojy Chian, the Technology Qualification Vehicle (TQV) will allow the fabulous fab to optimize its 28nm HKMG process for customer designs based on ARM's next-gen chip.
"This is a significant milestone on the road to high-volume 28nm manufacturing and technology leadership for next-generation products ranging from smart mobile devices to high-performance wired applications," explained Chian.
"By working closely with ARM in the early stages of technology qualification, we will enable our customers to rapidly bring their ARM Cortex-A9 designs with ARM physical IP to production by setting a new standard for performance and power-efficiency."
Indeed, TG Daily was told that the TQV design employs a fully optimized ARM Cortex-A9 physical IP suite, including a complete range of standard cell libraries, high-speed cache memory macros for L1 and density-optimized memories in other areas.
In addition, the TQV is designed to emulate a product-like system-on-chip (SoC) in "every way," which allows for maximum frequency analysis and short turnaround time between design cycles.
Finally, a complete range of Design for Testability (DFT) features enables Silicon-Spice correlation of Cortex-A9 critical paths and bit-mapping of cache memories at gigahertz speed.
Both ARM and GlobalFoundries project that the new chip manufacturing platform will enable a 40 percent increase in computing performance, a 30 percent decrease in power consumption and a 100 percent increase in standby battery life when compared to its 40nm predecessor.
Source: TG Daily
