GLOBALFOUNDRIES Launches High-Performance ASIC Offering on 14nm FinFET Process Technology

GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ FX-14(TM) delivers industry’s most complete ASIC offering for chip designers targeting cloud, data center, and communication applications

Santa Clara, Calif. -- November 11, 2015 -- GLOBALFOUNDRIES today announced the availability of FX-14, an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) offering built on the company’s next-generation 14nm FinFET process technology. The GLOBALFOUNDRIES FX-14 ASIC offering is an ideal solution for customers seeking to strike a balance between high bandwidth, low power, and cost for cloud networking, wireless base station, compute, and storage applications.

With the recent acquisition of IBM’s Microelectronics Division, the FX-14 ASIC offering combines GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ manufacturing scale and process technology leadership with a legacy of ASIC expertise that has helped customers bring some of the industry’s most complex ASICs to market. Using GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ 14LPP process technology, FX-14 leverages the production-proven 14nm FinFET platform from the company’s Fab 8 facility in Saratoga County, NY.

“In order to enable extremely high-speed connectivity solutions for a wide range of networking applications, we require ASIC solutions that provide an optimal balance of performance, power and cost,” said Kianoosh Naghshineh, CEO, Chelsio Communications, Inc. “The combination of the recently acquired IBM ASIC design expertise and GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ 14LPP technology enables Chelsio to continue to push the price-performance curve and deliver industry-leading solutions to our customers."

“The FX-14 ASIC offering continues to extend our leadership in delivering the most advanced ASIC solutions for the wired and wireless networking infrastructure,” said Mike Cadigan, senior vice president of product management at GLOBALFOUNDRIES. “Coupling the legacy of strong ASIC expertise with GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ 14LPP technology provides our customers the best combination to differentiate and stay ahead of evolving marketplace demands.”

The FX-14 ASIC offering includes an enhanced, optimized intellectual property (IP) portfolio, featuring leading-edge ARM cores and ARM® Artisan® physical IP. The broad lineup of cores for system-on-chip designs include 64-bit ARM Cortex®-A72 and ARM Cortex-A53 processors.

“The industry-leading ARM processors that power more than 95% percent of the smartphones shipping today are an ideal complement to GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ FX-14 ASIC offering,” said James McNiven, general manager, CPU group, ARM. “Our latest collaboration efforts with GLOBALFOUNDRIES on the FX-14 ASIC offering will further enable our mutual silicon partners to deliver highly-advanced SoCs.”

The FX-14 offering also delivers an optimized IP portfolio including High Speed Serdes (HSS) solutions. The HSS solutions range from the best in class architecture for high performance 56G backplane and chip-to-chip designs to optimized 30G and 16G SERDES designs covering a broad range of interface standards. GLOBALFOUNDRIES' embedded memory solutions include ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM), capable of billions of searches per second as well as high density and high performance memory compilers. These memory compilers exploit the industry’s smallest memory cell to achieve outstanding SRAM density as well as take advantage of a performance-tuned memory cell to achieve the best in class performance.

GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ 14LPP technology offering was qualified in the third quarter of 2015 and is on track for volume production in 2016. FX-14 design kits are available to customers now.

For more information on GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ ASIC solutions, visit our booth #607 at ARM TechCon from November 10-12, in Santa Clara, California, or go online at http://www.globalfoundries.com.

ABOUT GLOBALFOUNDRIES

GLOBALFOUNDRIES is the world’s first full-service semiconductor foundry with a truly global footprint. Launched in March 2009, the company has quickly achieved scale as one of the largest foundries in the world, providing a unique combination of advanced technology and manufacturing to more than 250 customers. With operations in Singapore, Germany and the United States, GLOBALFOUNDRIES is the only foundry that offers the flexibility and security of manufacturing centers spanning three continents. The company’s 300mm fabs and 200mm fabs provide the full range of process technologies from mainstream to the leading edge. This global manufacturing footprint is supported by major facilities for research, development and design enablement located near hubs of semiconductor activity in the United States, Europe and Asia. GLOBALFOUNDRIES is owned by Mubadala Development Company. For more information, visit http://www.globalfoundries.com.