ARM community focuses on low power chip processes

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ARM community focuses on low power chip processes

Samsung and GlobalFoundries form alliance, Qualcomm joins Sematech

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 16 June, 2010

READ MORE: ARM | Samsung | Semiconductor

The next wave of high end mobile devices will rely on innovations in chip design - with Motorola rather vaguely promising a smartphone with a 2GHz processor within a year. But they will also require breakthroughs in how those chips are manufactured, in order to achieve the combination of performance and low power that mobile web products will require. This has led to two big name announcements this week - Samsung has formed a new development pact with manufacturer GlobalFoundries to address low power, while Qualcomm has become the first fabless chip firm to join the association of silicon manufacturers, Sematech, in a bid to influence future processes.

Samsung, GlobalFoundries and other manufacturers of ARM-based processors are creating a development platform, designed to speed the development and commercial-grade release of low power mobile chips. The platform will include design and engineering tools, plus intellectual property from ARM, and low power process technology from The Common Platform (a joint venture of IBM, Samsung and GlobalFoundries). The overall objective is to design and produce mobile and embedded chips more rapidly using the cutting edge of current processes, at 32nm and 28nm, which enable very low levels of power consumption. This would enable the industry to respond more flexibly to the rapidly changing requirements of makers of handsets, netbooks and a host of other consumer and industrial devices.

Samsung Electronics, the giant's semiconductor arm, said it had completed reliability testing and was ready to start volume production of its next generation of low power chips using the 32nm manufacturing process. It claimed a 30% power reduction from the transition from 45nm. Samsung designs and/or manufactures chips for a range of device makers as well as supplying some products to its handset sister company.

GlobalFoundries will focus on 28nm mobile chips and will start production in the fourth quarter. It will also implement a 32nm process in future, geared to high performance devices such as PC chips from its customer AMD.

The new venture follows logically from a major partnership created last year between ARM and GlobalFoundries, designed to address low power. In January, ARM showed the first processor based on its core and using a 28nm process, which will go into production in the second half of the year, promising 40% more performance at 30% less power consumption compared to 40nm versions. GlobalFoundries, which was spun off from AMD last year, will offer production of chips based on ARM licenses to customers such as ST-Ericsson, Qualcomm and IBM. Intel recently moved to the 32nm process.

Meanwhile, another ARM-based major, Qualcomm, has not been as directly involved in process improvements, because it outsources all its manufacturing, claiming this gives it agility to embrace new processes. But its scale gives it a strong influence over its manufacturing partners, TSMC of Taiwan and GlobalFoundries, and now it is strengthening that hand by joining Sematech, which is an industry alliance focused on R&D in semiconductor manufacture. Qualcomm's interest is to help address the challenge of Moore's Law, trying to cram more and more transistors onto a chip (according to Moore's Law, the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18-24 months, driving down cost and boosting performance). To keep the law in effect, new approaches to chip design and manufacturing will be required, including massively multicore chips, massively parallel processing over thousands of separate chips, or 3D stacking of logic circuits. Though many of these projects are geared to cloud servers and the data center, increasingly parallel and multicore techniques are becoming relevant to ever more powerful and multifunctional mobile devices.

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