IBM is the first announced customer for GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ Fab 8 in Malta, NY. The companies plan to manufacture IBM’s 32nm SOI devices at the site using an SOI process technology. The new plant has already been facilitized with more than 500 chip-making tools including “at least” seven litho machines.
The ICs in question were developed at IBM’s East Fishkill 300mm fab and have already been produced at the GLOBALFOUNDRIES Malta Fab, according to this IBM press release. Volume production in the GLOBALFOUNDRIES facility is expected later this year.
The press release also makes note of using eDRAM, IBM’s embedded DRAM, which IBM appears to be using for on-chip processor cache based on this IBM press release from 2007. Of course, processor caches are perpetually busy so DRAM refresh in a cache-use context isn’t much of an issue and the real estate advantage of on-chip DRAM over SRAM appears to be 3:1 while the power-consumption advantage appears to be 5:1. These advantages presumably outweigh the somewhat more expensive process additions required to build DRAM on the same chip with logic.
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