If we keep in mind that Intel and Samsung are already capable of producing 14nm FinFET transistors, this headline must sound boring. Nevertheless, since competition is good for business it's great to see that GlobalFoundries reports their latest advancements.

For a very long time GlobalFoundries has been stuck with the 28nm and even the 32nm manufacturing process. Meanwhile the company formed a strategic partnership with Samsung to mass produce 14nm FinFET SoC's for high-end smartphones. Apart from that GlobalFoundries appears to be making good process themselves these days and they're introducing their new "fully-depleted silicon-on-insulator" FD-SOI manufacturing process technology. This process allow GlobalFoundries to build chips which offer high levels of performance and at the same time cost can be reduced.

Checking on a report from KitGuru the following four versions of the process are available from GlobalFoundries:

• 22FD-ulp: recommended for inexpensive SoCs and offers 70 percent reduced power consumption compared to 28nm chips
• 22FD-uhp: recommended for networking applications
• 22FD-ull: recommended for "Internet of Things" devices and offers low leakage
• 22FD-rfa: recommended for LTE modems or MIMO Wi-Fi modems

It can be expected that risk production starts in the second half of 2016 and mass production of the 22FDX based chips ramps up in the second half of 2017. So far GlobalFoundries is collaborating with a number of big players like ARM, Imagination Technologies, Freescale, IBS, STMicroelectronics, VeriSilicon and more.