Toshiba partners up with Globalfoundries

Toshiba will expand its FFSATM business through production at Globalfoundries’s fabs. Initial products will be manufactured using Globalfoundries 65nm-LPe and 40nm-LP processes, with plans to extend the collaboration to the company’s 28nm High-K Metal Gate (HKMG) technology. Toshiba recognizes that it is important to shorten both the production period and the layout design period, in order to provide customers with samples with a very short turn-around-time, which is the aim of the collaboration with Globalfoundries. The collaboration will allow Toshiba to produce samples in five weeks from design hand-off, a fifth of the time required for conventional ASICs. “The FFSATM product series is one of our key strategic LSIs,” said Masakazu Kakumu, Corporate Vice President, Toshiba Corporation and Executive Vice President, Toshiba Corporation Semiconductor & Storage Products Company. “We decided to partner with GLOBALFOUDRIES to manufacture FFSATM wafers because it allows us to achieve the short turn-around time crucial to FFSATM, for both engineering samples and mass production. It also ensures that we can support high quality and yields with high volume capacity.” “We are very pleased to have been selected as the primary wafer foundry for Toshiba’s FFSA products,” said Chuck Fox, senior vice president of worldwide sales at Globalfoundries. “With development costs for today’s SoC products becoming out of reach for many companies, Toshiba’s FFSA technology can dramatically reduce development costs and manufacturing cycle times by customizing only a few interconnect layers.”