GlobalFoundries to manufacture 28nm Cortex-A9 design

When ARM announced a cooperation with GlobalFoundries, the question about the nature of this deal came into place. Thanks to Subramani Kengeri, VP of Design Solutions at GlobalFoundries - we managed to find out just that. According to Subramani, the very first thing GlobalFoundries did was license a Cortex-A9 MPCore in order to build a reference design for 28nm HKMG [High-K Metal Gate] / Gate First design.

When GlobalFoundries was splitting from AMD, the company also acquired CPU Design Team that closely worked with IBM in East Fishkill Fab. The expertise of that team and the Design Team in Dresden expanded from standard SOI [Silicon-On-Insulator] CPUs to world's first SOI GPU [graphics subsystem inside Llano / AMD Fusion APU] and to bulk silicon. For bulk silicon, GlobalFoundries elected to use Cortex-A9 MPCore IP, as the company views that part as one of key ingredients for future smartphones, smartbooks, netbooks, tablets and the like. You can expect the official announcement once that the company finishes the design, currently scheduled for June/July, with mass-production starting in the second half of 2010.