Fellowship of semiconductor companies has been created where the chaps at IBM, AMD, Henry Richard’s Freescale, Infenion, Samsung and Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Ltd. have joined their forces against Intel. IBM will lead the fellowship into the battle against Intel’s 32nm process.

The key point in development is the new high k/metal gate that should be ready for the members of the fellowship at the second half of 2009.

This new fellowship approach should help IBM clients to make the transition easier and at the same time, the new transistors and process will improve the performance and reduce power consumption.

IBM and its Alliance Partners have developed low-power foundry Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology using the 'high-k gate-first' approach and have demonstrated the first 32nm ultra-dense static random access memory (SRAM) in this low-power technology with cell sizes below 0.15um2.  SRAMs are a key building block of computer chip designs and an excellent indicator of the readiness of a technology. 

IBM and its Alliance Partners have incorporated the high-k innovation into a new generation of high-performance Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) technology at 32nm.  The unique high-k material properties enable a transistor speed improvement of greater than 30 percent over the previous generation of high performance Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) technology.

Let’s hope that AMD will be on time in late 2009 with its 32nm products, as it looks as if Intel will be.