Globalfoundries start fabbing 28nm wafers

First chip is a triple core MIPS-based design from eSilicon

eSilicon has just taped out their first 28nm MIPS processor that has now started fabbing at GlobalFoundries’ Fab 1 in Dresden according to a joint press release from eSilicon and MIPS.

eSilion may not be broadly known, but is a value chain provider that has taped out the chip as a proof of concept test chip.

The 1074Kf CPS is based on two high performance technologies according to eSilicon. These are coherent multiprocessing and the superscalar, out-of-order MIPS32 74K processor core as the base CPU and clocks in at 1.5GHz.

The 74K processor is an out-of-order CPU with 15 stages and is already in production with several manufacturers.  Customers can purchase a 1GHz implementation from eSilcon either as-is or customized and then send it out for fabbing.

There are yet no word on the expected yield, but we hope that the 28nm process turns out better for AMD than the 32nm high-k metal gate process that is currently suffering from severe yield problems.

“This was an exciting project for our custom IP engineers,” said Paul Hollingworth, vice president of strategic marketing at eSilicon, in a statement. “Our custom FCIs did the trick in enabling us to meet the fast-approaching shuttle date. Together with the high quality of the MIPS 1074K design, we were able to quickly meet the challenging performance targets in a low-power process.”S|A

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