GlobalFoundries And AMD Achieve 14nm FinFET Technology Success
GlobalFoundries has demonstrated silicon success on the first AMD products using GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ 14nm FinFET process technology. GlobalFoundries, AMD’s former chip manufacturing arm, was pun-off from AMD in 2009. Last year, the company opted to license Samsung’s 14nm FinFET process. But this year, GlobalFoundries' own 14nm FinFET technology is planned to be integrated into multiple AMD products that address the need for high-performance, power-efficient compute and graphics technologies across a broad set of applications, from personal computers to data centers to immersive computing devices.
AMD has taped out multiple products using GlobalFoundries' 14nm Low Power Plus (14LPP) process technology and is currently conducting validation work on 14LPP production samples.
The 14LPP platform taps the benefits of three-dimensional, fully-depleted FinFET transistors. Relative to the earlier 14nm Low Power Early (14LPE) design, 14LPP is a refined process designed to offer roughly 10% better performance.
GlobalFoundries says its 14LPP FinFET is ramping with production-ready yields and excellent model-to-hardware correlation at its Fab 8 facility in New York. In January, the early-access version of the technology (14LPE) was successfully qualified for volume production, while achieving yield targets on customer products. The performance-enhanced version of the technology (14LPP) was qualified in the third quarter of 2015, with the early ramp occurring in the fourth quarter of 2015 and full-scale production set for 2016.