Common Platform Alliance foresees 10XM process in 2015

The Common Platform Alliance members showed off their new roadmap at last week's 2013 Common Platform Technology Forum in Santa Clara, California. The alliance, which consists of IBM, GlobalFoundries and Samsung, announced 20nm Planar LPM is going to be released later this year, and that next year will see the adoption of FinFET transistors with the 14XM process, before introducing the 10XM process in 2015. Full details at Bright Side of News.

Thus, Common Platform decided to continue naming its processes with the industry standard, but they are making a clear distinction that their 14XM and now the 10XM are "14nm and 10nm FinFET transistors on a 20nm or 14nm process". There is a particularly good reason for this, as we are approaching to boundaries of modern lithography, before the whole industry makes the jump to EUV (Extreme Ultra-Violet) process.

In a conversation with the executives inside of semiconductor industry, we were told that "we are at the beginning of new process wars," our source said under the condition of anonymity. "ARM awoke the manufacturing giant and now they will have to deal with the increased power the new ARMv8 architecture brings. (Google) Nexus 10 is the best example as it runs at 9 Watts during the benchmarks, and you can practically have a low-power (Intel) Ivy Bridge processor for that amount of power. Nobody expected that from an ARM-based processor." Furthermore, the source that designs products based on ARM and x86 architectures told us "There are plenty of choices but the key lies with the silicon. The key differentiator no longer lies with the price, but with the experience that a device can provide. Industry learned that with Apple."