Posted on Tuesday, September 06 2011 @ 17:39 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Bright Side of News
reports customers can use SOI at 20nm if they obtain a license from IBM:
Also, there was confusion with the 20nm node, with Gregg Bartlett and Ajit Manoche initially stating that they are not going to use the SOI at 20nm and that the decision was made purely for "business reasons". After our initial story, we received word from GlobalFoundries and SOITEC that decision to go SOI or remain bulk is not made by the foundry, but the semiconductor company has to license the technology from IBM and that decision is made on case-by-case basis. Read: you want SOI, you pay IBM to use it and then GF can make it.
According to the roadmap (pictured above), you can see that AMD will introduce 28nm Server processors, clearly not following Intel with the 22nm node in 2013. We guesstimate that AMD will take the 28nm (SOI? Bulk?), 20nm (SOI? Bulk?) and then go for advanced 14nm ETSOI route. The successor of Bobcat i.e. Ontario/Zacate low-power Fusion APUs could end on an 16nm "half-node", depending on decisions made by GlobalFoundries and TSMC.
