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 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 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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