ARM and TSMC have announced a new multi-year agreement in order to develop ARM-based processors which are based on TSMC 10FinFET process technology.

The companies announced the new agreement on Thursday. The firms said that success in scaling from 20SoC to 16FinFET and the popularity of such technology influenced the new deal, and both ARM and TSMC will collaborate again for 10FinFET.

ARM and TSMC hope that developing the roadmap early will result in 10FinFET designs as early as Q4 2015.

Pete Hutton, executive vice president and president of product groups at ARM said in prepared remarks:

"ARM and TSMC are industry leaders in our respective fields and collectively ensure the availability of leading-edge solutions for ARM-based SoCs through our deep and long-term collaboration.

Our mutual commitment to providing industry leading solutions drives us to work together early in the development cycle to optimize both the processor and the process node. This joint optimization enables ARM silicon partners to design, tape-out and bring their products to market faster."

TSMC, also known as Taiwan Semiconductor, will base the new networking chips on 20SoC and 16FinFET in the ARM ecosystem in order to improve both performance and power consumption levels in next generation hardware.

Using a technique TSMC calls CoWoS (chip-on-wafer-on-substrate), the Taiwanese firm is able to combine different process nodes on a single substrate -- which results in smaller hardware. The company also says that the ARM ecosystem is able to take advantage of TSMC’s Open Innovation Platform (OIP) which includes a set of ecosystem interfaces and collaborative components, which should boost research and development.

"TSMC has continuously been the lead foundry to introduce advanced process technology for ARM-based SoCs," said Dr. Cliff Hou, TSMC vice president of R&D. "Together with ARM, we proved out in silicon the high performance and low power of the big.LITTLE architecture as implemented in 16FinFET. Given the successful adoption of our previous collaborative efforts, it makes sense that we continue this fruitful partnership with ARM in future 64-bit cores and 10FinFET."

By: DocMemory
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