65 nm: Where are the chips?

By Edward Keyes, Courtesy of EE Times
Nov 6 2006 (9:00 AM)

In January of this year--about two years after it shipped the first 90-nanometer Prescott--Intel began shipping 65-nm versions of its Pentium D Presler processor. Intel has now shipped more than 40 million 65-nm processors.

In the normal course of events, other major integrated device manufacturers--like Advanced Micro Devices, IBM and Texas Instruments--would have followed up on the release of a 65-nm Intel processor with releases of their own microprocessors at the same node. Shortly thereafter, the major fabless semiconductor vendors would have offered their 65-nm products, typically FPGAs from Altera (fabbed by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing) or Xilinx (fabricated by United Microelectronics).

Oddly enough, however, there were few 65-nm products in volume production at the end of October, although there do appear to be a few new entrants on the horizon. Semiconductor Insights has early samples of both AMD's 65-nm processor and Xilinx's Virtex-5 (built on UMC's 65-nm process). AMD and Xilinx have announced that they will begin shipping 65-nm versions of their products in December. IBM, however, says that its new 65-nm flagship processor, the Power 6, won't be in volume production until the middle of 2007.

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