Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and ARM have expanded their long-standing manufacturing partnership for system-on-chips (SoCs) to include TSMC’s 7nm FinFET process technology.
The multi-year agreement will allow TSMC foundry partners to utilize ARM’s intellectual property (IP) cores in their design for future low-power, high-performance SoCs to be used in mobile devices, next-generation networks and data centers. The new agreement expands a previous arrangement that included TSMC’s 16nm and 10nm FinFET process technologies that have featured ARM Artisan foundation physical IP.
Previously the agreement between the companies allowed customers to accelerate product development cycles and to take advantage of leading-edge processes and IP, TSMC says. The agreement allowed TSMC customers to receive early access to Artisan physical IP and tape-outs of the ARM Cortex-A72 processor on 16nm FinFET and 10nm FinFET.
According to ARM, this agreement will allow designers of future data centers and network infrastructure to scale the industry’s lowest-power architecture across all performance points. TSMC says next-generation networks and data centers will be able to garner the same power or lower power at the same performance using 7nm FinFET as compared to TSMC’s 10nm FinFET process node.
