Globalfoundries to help manufacture Toshiba's FFSA devices
The plans are to extend 28nm High-K Metal Gate technology
Toshiba has announced that it will collaborate with Globalfoundries in the manufacture of Toshiba's FFSA (Fit Fast Structured Array) products.
Toshiba will expand its FFSA business through production at Globalfoundries's fabs. Initial products will be manufactured using Globalfoundries 65nm-LPe and 40nm-LP processes.
Toshiba's FFSA products, developed in collaboration with BaySand Inc. of the U.S., can be configured simply by customising the design of a few metal layers. This customisation process secures a much shorter development turn-around-time than with conventional ASIC devices, and satisfies increasing market needs for high performance, high specifications and low power technologies.
At a time of ever-shorter product life cycles, time available for development is at a premium, and solutions that meet demand and allow tweaking of the specifications until just before the start of trial production increase the freedom and flexibility of developers.
Toshiba recognises that it is important to shorten both the production period and the layout design period, in order to provide customers with samples with a very short turn-around-time.
The collaboration with Globalfoundries, will secure this, and allow Toshiba to produce samples in five weeks from design hand-off, a fifth of the time required for conventional ASICs.
"The FFSA product series is one of our key strategic LSIs," says Masakazu Kakumu, Corporate Vice President, Toshiba Corporation and Executive Vice President, Toshiba Corporation Semiconductor & Storage Products Company.
Kakumu adds, "We decided to partner with Globalfoundries to manufacture FFSA wafers because it allows us to achieve the short turn-around time crucial to FFSA, for both engineering samples and mass production. It also ensures that we can support high quality and yields with high volume capacity."
"We are very pleased to have been selected as the primary wafer foundry for Toshiba's FFSA products," says Chuck Fox, senior vice president of worldwide sales at Globalfoundries. "With development costs for today's SoC products becoming out of reach for many companies, Toshiba's FFSA technology can dramatically reduce development costs and manufacturing cycle times by customising only a few interconnect layers."
The two companies will seek to deepen their relationship to provide customers with the best solutions.
