LONDON–Foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd has announced it has made a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor test chip in its 28-nm high-performance mobile CMOS process that it has run at a 3.1-GHz clock frequency under typical operating conditions.
TSMC (Hsinchu, Taiwan) said that this achievement demonstrates that the 28-nm HPM process is ready for use in a broad range of mobile, consumer, and enterprise applications.
For mobile application signoff conditions, the 28HPM process delivers clock frequencies in the range of 1.5 GHz to 2.0 GHz, TSMC said. But for high-performance requirements it can be run up to 3.1 GHz, the company said. This could work either for very short-term use or where power consumption is less critical because a system is connected to a main supply of electricity.
The 28HPM implementation runs twice as fast as the 40-nm counterpart made by TSMC under the same operating conditions, according to Cliff Hou, vice president of R&D at TSMC.
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This story was originally posted by EE Times.
