How LETI IP will speed-up GlobalFoundries 22FDX ASIC Development

By SemiWiki

October 19, 2015

GlobalFoundries has positioned FDSOI proposal -22FDX- to provide better performance and power dissipation than competitive FDSOI offers on 28nm node. The FDSOI licensing agreement between LETI and GlobalFoundries is only a couple of months old (July 2015), but the real work has started in Dresden as several engineers from LETI are working to secure FDSOI porting in GlobalFoundries wafer Fab. But the partnership goes further as Leti will also provide GlobalFoundries’ customers circuit-design IP, including for its back-bias feature for FD-SOI, which enables exceptional performance at very low voltages with low leakage.

I like the picture below, extracted from a presentation made by Rutger Wijburg, senior vice president and general manager of fab management at Globalfoundries Inc., during the Semicon Europa exhibition held in Dresden. Such a picture is far more efficient than a long talk as it says everything: the PC wave of the 2000’s was based on expensive Silicon targeting maximum performance for about 300 million systems per year. The next big wave is concerning 1,500 million systems per year, relying on devices offering 75% cheapest costs per gate designed for performance efficiency, or maximum battery life time. Finally, the expected IoT wave will be built on completely different devices characterized by minimum possible size and a cost per sq mm divided by 5 compared with smartphone application processors… Such an evolution is more like a revolution.