GlobalFoundries has now confirmed earlier rumors that the company will be skipping 10nm manufacturing process and go straight for 7nm, hopefully ahead of the competition.

According to GlobalFoundries, the move from 14nm FinFET to 7nm FinFET manufacturing process should deliver twice the density and a 30 percent performance boost.

GlobalFoundries plans to invest a lot of money in its Fab 8 facility that will be used for 7nm FinFET manufacturing process, and should be re-using a significant amount of tools currently used in 14nm proces.s

While it did not give out any precise dates, GlobalFoundries did note that it expect the 7nm process to be "the next long-lived node" and expects to deliver a differentiated 7nm FinFET technology "by tapping years of experience in manufacturing high-performance chips, the talent and know-how of our former IBM Microelectronics colleagues and the world-class R&D pipeline from our research alliance."

Earlier rumors suggest that GlobalFoundries has already started to make test chips in Fab 8 and should be ready for customer production design sometime in the second half of 2017, with first production in early 2018.



Source: BusinessWire.com.