Freescale Forging Ahead to 45 nm in 2008
David Lammers, News Editor -- Semiconductor International, 3/4/2008
Freescale Semiconductor Inc. (Austin, Texas) is skipping the 65 nm generation and moving directly from 90 to 45 nm design rules by the second half of this year for its networking chips, said Lisa Su, CTO.
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| Lisa Su, CTO, Freescale Semiconductor Inc. |
As a member of the IBM-led Fishkill alliance since January 2007, Freescale is developing silicon on insulator (SOI) technology along with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD, Sunnyvale, Calif.) and IBM Corp. (Armonk, N.Y.)
Freescale manufactures its 90 nm SOI products at a 200 mm fab in Austin, but will move to foundries for 45 nm manufacturing starting with Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing (Singapore). The Freescale products will use an oxynitride (non-high-k) gate oxide, she added.
“We wanted to be ahead of the curve for our networking products. When we joined the IBM alliance last year, we made the decision to jump to 45 nm as a way to best get the performance and power our customers need,” Su said.
The networking products will require the technical staff to develop software that allows legacy applications to run on the multi-core networking chips.
Su said Freescale’s customers tend to have long evaluation cycles, and don’t move from node to node as quickly as the high-performance computer market. Networking customers “seek more capabilities, but within a given power envelope of 10 to 30 W -- they are stringent about the power envelope they face,” she said.
Asked if Freescale will stick with SOI technology, Su said she often faces that question. “We go through that conversation every generation at Freescale, and the answers are different and changing with time. For us, performance is important, and SOI also gives us power advantages. The resistance to soft error rates is another plus for SOI. The path to 32 nm on SOI is clear,” she said.
While Chartered is Freescale’s SOI foundry of record, she noted that both Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC, Hsinchu, Taiwan) and United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC, Hsinchu, Taiwan) have joined the SOI Consortium. While Freescale largely adheres to the Fishkill process flow for 45 nm, Su said Freescale modified its SRAM cell to adjust the threshold voltage higher and slightly thickened the gate oxide.
“Within the alliance members, we are sharing more libraries and intellectual property. That way we can all cover so much more,” she said, acknowledging that Freescale’s own past attempts to share intellectual property (IP) among its various product groups ran into resistance. “It is hard to share intellectual property, but it is an enabling technology that allows our design teams to spend their resources on differentiating design work,” she said.
Freescale saw 2007 revenues drop by 10% to $5.72B, largely because its wireless IC sales to Motorola’s handset unit declined as Motorola’s handset market share plummeted. Freescale, the former Motorola semiconductor products sector (SPS), was acquired by a private equity consortium led by the Blackstone Group in September 2006 for $17.6B. Since then, the company has sought to reduce costs, but Su said R&D has not been affected.
“R&D is more than 20% of revenues and we are not taking our foot off the gas there. New products are what drives the growth engine. I think Freescale is a little bit misunderstood these days. Would we like revenues to be higher? Of course. But in terms of gross margins, and looking at our customer base, we are in a very good position. What we are concentrating on is not cutting costs so much as developing new products that will give us growth.”
With engineering degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, Cambridge, Mass.), Su first worked at Texas Instruments Inc. (TI, Dallas) and then joined IBM in 1995, rising through the technical ranks to become vice president of IBM’s Semiconductor Research and Development Center. In June 2007, she was named senior vice president and CTO of Freescale.
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