Chipmakers join forces on nano research
Published: 30 Jul 2002 13:14 BST
Chipmakers AMD and Infineon Technologies, together with Taiwan's UMC, are collaborating to create faster, cooler and more power-saving processors expected to be at the heart of the next generation of computers.
The companies will develop chips based on the 65- and 45-nanometre (or 0.065 and 0.045 micron) processes.
Such processors are expected to power the next wave of desktop, server and portable computers. The nanometre measurement refers to the size of the conducting threads within the processor's core. The finer the thread, the less power it consumes and hence the cooler it runs. This gives chip designers the wiggle room to squeeze in ever more transistors, to up processing power.
AMD and its much larger rival, Intel, are locked in a race to reduce the size of the core as a means of wringing out even more clock cycles, which is currently topped out at 2.53GHz for Intel's desktop Pentium 4 chip and 1.8GHz for AMD's Athlon XP 2200+.
Intel's Pentium 4 processors and the Athlon XP 2200+ feature 130-nanometre technology, the current limit for mainstream products.
Each of the three companies in the joint development programme will supply engineering resources and expertise to develop common platform technologies, Infineon said a statement.
Another aim of the project will be to allow the new chips to be cut from 300-millimeter wafers. Compared with 200mm wafers in current use, 300mm wafers allow chipmakers to produce about 2.5 times more chips per wafer, increasing production volume, as well as reduce cost per chip by up to 30 per cent.
Infineon Asia-Pacific spokesman Kaye Lim said that the initial development work will be conducted at a UMC facility in Hsinchu, Taiwan. Next year, development will move to Singapore, where UMC already has struck separate deals with AMD and Infineon to build large wafer fabs.
The previously announced UMC-Infineon wafer fab joint venture, known as UMCi, will see the creation of a $3.6bn plant specialisng in 300mm wafers. The facility will is expected to be manufacturing in quantity by the end of 2003.
The new agreement to build 65nm and 45nm technology follows earlier deals struck between UMC and Infineon to create 130nm and 90nm technology, as well as an existing programme between AMD and UMC to develop 65nm and 45nm cores.
"AMD's joint development work with UMC and Infineon is a prime example of the type of cooperation that will come to lead the semiconductor industry in the age of 300mm manufacturing," Hector Ruiz, president and chief executive of AMD said in the statement.
"This effort will form the foundation for AMD's 65nm and 45nm manufacturing technologies, and allow us to put additional development emphasis in process technology areas that are critical to our business and our customers, such as high-performance transistors and interconnects," Ruiz said.
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