ARM and semiconductor foundry UMC have signed a long term agreement under which UMC will use the ARM Artisan Physical IP solutions for its 28nm process technology.
As a result of this agreement, customers of UMC will now be able to make use of the entire range of physical IP solutions such as the ARM Cortex-A processor series, which are compatible with the ARM technology.
According to Simon Segars, who is the Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Physical IP Division of ARM, this collaboration between ARM and UMC will lead to higher performance levels, efficient energy usage and increased density of chip. This will also help in developing the process technology for the physical IP 28nm nodes. According to S.C.Chien, Vice President for UMC’s Customer Engineering and IP Development Design Support Division, the 10 year relationship between ARM and UMC has been further expanded through this collaboration. Apart from enhancing process technologies, this collaboration will reduce the time to market for important market segments.
The 28nm process technology from UMC features the high-K metal gate structure with ultra low leakage levels and helps design engineers in achieving long battery life and higher performance by providing many options such as memory bit-cells, device voltages, and overdrive and underdrive capacities. The 28nm process technology, which is targeted at applications that require high performance such as high-speed digital and home networking and portable wireless and mobile devices is due for pilot production by the middle of 2012.
Source: http://www.arm.com