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TITLE: Common Platform for Manufacturing at 90-nm and 65-nm
A common platform has been announced by Chartered Semiconductor
Manufacturing and IBM for manufacturing 90-nm and 65-nm
devices. Cadence, Synopsys, and Magma all support the platform.
Large, established foundry customers want to be sure there's
enough manufacturing capacity behind a given process so that
their risk is mitigated and they can address the market demand.
Cost is also a very sensitive issue, so multisourcing and
flexibility of sourcing are important and strategic concerns.
The Common Platform is based on the CMOS low-k process, and it is
the same, exact 90nm process being manufactured by IBM at B323 in
Fishkill and in Chartered's Fab 7 in Singapore. There are no
differences at all; it has the same electrical parameters and the
same SPICE models. IBM and Chartered are working very closely to
make sure that, on the manufacturing side, they are equivalent
processes with very similar yields. The goal is to enable
customers to dual-source at both manufacturers or to move from
one manufacturing source to another on this platform.
In addition, Chartered and IBM also have an agreement on SOI,
which is a Chartered "make for" IBM, meaning Chartered can
manufacture 90-nm SOI products for IBM and its customers at the
direction of IBM.
The IP space needs the Common Platform even more, because it is
made up of many small IP companies that are finding the going
difficult. Up to 30%-40% of their resources are spent not
developing new IP, but on porting an existing piece of IP from
one process to another. Now, with this common process, they can
potentially sell the same piece of IP to many customers and
customer bases, and instead of wasting time porting, they can
develop more pieces of IP.
IBM and Chartered have been joined at 65-nm by Samsung and
Infineon. Thus, four different companies will be manufacturing
that same exact process. Each company saves in cost of
development; each company reaps the benefits of partnership in
terms of joint qualification vehicles, sharing of yield data, and
understanding how to get the process up and running, technology
transfers, and also the common design enablement platform to be
on top of these processes.
This model will be the industry standard for leading-edge process
development in the next few years. It's getting tougher and
tougher for any one company to go it alone, especially with all
the pressures with regard to time-to-market, cost, the necessity
to innovate and come up with creative ideas and solutions.
There's an economy of scale in having multiple companies
involved: it benefits us not just in terms of process
development, but in every aspect of the platform.
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FILENUMBER: 1227
BEGIN_KEYWORDS
Common Platform Manufacturing 90-nm 65-nm
END_KEYWORDS
DATE: July 2005
TITLE: Common Platform for Manufacturing at 90-nm and 65-nm
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