TSMC, Imagination optimise 16nm FinFET for mobile

Imagination Technologies will work with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) to develop reference design flows using the graphics core licensor's PowerVR Series 6 GPUs for manufacturing processes including the foundry's 16nm FinFET process.

GPU cores are coming to dominate the area, power and performance of SoCs and therefore process design flows and libraries need to be tuned and optimised for them.

The use of high bandwidth memory channels and 3D IC assembly will be part of the collaboration and should allow the two companies to demonstrate high performance, small physical footprint and low power, said Imagination Technologies Group.

"Just as memory drove silicon processes in the 80s and 90s, and CPUs drove processes further in the late 90s and 00s, high performance mobile GPUs for graphics and compute applications are one of the major drivers for our most advanced process technologies," said Cliff Hou, vice president of R&D at TSMC, in a statement issued by Imagination.

Hossein Yassaie, CEO of Imagination, said: "Through advanced projects initiated under this partnership, Imagination and TSMC are working together to showcase how SoCs will transform the future of mobile and embedded products."

As well as developing the widely licensed PowerVR series of graphics processors, Imagination also offers the PowerVR VPU video decoder and encoder, the Ensigma radio processor unit (RPU) which covers connectivity applications and the recently acquired line of MIPS processor cores.

- Peter Clarke
??EE Times