GlobalFoundries

Competition is what made the semiconductor industry and semiconductors themselves what they are today! Competition is what drives innovation and keeps costs down. Not destructive competition, where the success of one depends on the failure of another, but constructive competition that promotes mutual survival and growth where everybody can win. The semiconductor design ecosystem on the other ...

GLOBALFOUNDRIES showed off its 28nm design ecosystem at #48DAC last week in San Diego. The company featured a full design ecosystem for its 28nm High-k Metal Gate (HKMG) technology, including silicon-validated flows, process design kits (PDKs), design-for-manufacturing (DFM), and intellectual property (IP) in partnership with industry leaders. 28nm is the ...

The GlobalFoundries DRC+ platform is one of the most innovative DFM technologies and was well represented at #48DAC. In case you missed it, here is a reprint of a DRC+ overview from GFI just prior to #48DAC:



DRC (Design Rule Constraints) are the fundamental principles in constraining VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) circuit designs to standardized physical and electrical manufacturability criterion.

Today's component miniaturization ...

Introduction
Monday morning at DAC I attended the breakfast presentation from Magma, ARM and GLOBALFOUNDRIES. The 28nm node is ready for business using Magma tools and ARM libraries.

During breakfast I met Karim Arabi, Ph.D. from QualComm. He's a senior director of engineering in San Diego and wanted to learn more about the 28nm node and how Magma tools could be used in a flow.



Notes


Rod Metcalf – Magma, 28nm Reference Flow Development, using the Talus flow manager for the entire IC design flow. We ran a testcase to ensure silicon validation. ...

GLOBALFOUNDRIES will show off its 28nm design ecosystem at #48DAC next week in San Diego. The company will feature a full design ecosystem for its 28nm High-k Metal Gate (HKMG) technology, including silicon-validated flows, process design kits (PDKs), design-for-manufacturing (DFM), and intellectual property (IP) in partnership with industry leaders. 28nm is the second node of HKMG production for GFI with ...

Although there has been always a strong relationship between Kilopass and Chartered Semiconductor, this relationship has been even enhanced after the acquisition of Chartered by GLOBALFOUNDRIES, allowing Kilopass’s customers to integrate NVM IP on advanced technology nodes, down to 40nm or even 28nm in the near future.







Before going more in detail into the NVM technology and type of IP available on GLOBALFOUNDRIES technologies, I would like to understand to which extent NVM is –and will be in the future- a strategic piece of a SoC design. To do so, let’s try to quickly build a forecast for IC, ASIC or ASSP, which will integrate at least one NVM IP. This NVM can be used for:

• Chip Identification (unique ID per IC)


• Trimming or calibration (usually for mixed signal IC)


• Coefficient storage (specific to Image sensor)


• Configuration


• ROM patching


• MCU code storage

We will look at the two major market segments where NVM is commonly used: Mobile Electronic Devices (Wireless handset and Media Tablet) and Consumer Electronics (Set-Top-Box and HDTV), simply because the applications from these two segments are generating huge production volumes. Using information from the very good article: “Reap the Benefits without the Cost: Mobile Handset Chips Utilize Antifuse NVM from Configuration to Code Storage” that you can find here (***), we have been able to evaluate the number of IC using NVM in a Smartphone, as well as in the more traditional feature phone and low cost handset. We have used the Wireless Handset 2010-2015 forecast built by IPnest to evaluate the number of systems, as well as some data from ABI research for the Media Tablet, so we have built the following table:Let me be precise and state that we had to make some approximation: the Automotive and Industrial segments ...