[By NBC-1TV H. J Yook]Toshiba Corporation (http://goo.gl/p8j1Ek) (TOKYO:6502) today announced that the company will collaborate with GLOBALFOUNDRIES in the manufacture of Toshiba's FFSATM (Fit Fast Structured Array) products. Toshiba will expand its FFSATM business through production at GLOBALFOUNDRIES’s fabs. Initial products will be manufactured using GLOBALFOUNDRIES 65nm-LPe and 40nm-LP processes, with plans to extend the collaboration to the company’s 28nm High-K Metal Gate (HKMG) technology.

Toshiba’s FFSATM products, developed in collaboration with BaySand Inc. of the U.S., can be configured simply by customizing the design of a few metal layers. This customization process secures a much shorter development turn-around-time than with conventional ASIC devices, and satisfies increasing market needs for high performance, high specifications and low power technologies. At a time of ever-shorter product life cycles, time available for development is at a premium, and solutions that meet demand and allow tweaking of the specifications until just before the start of trial production increase the freedom and flexibility of developers.

Toshiba recognizes that it is important to shorten both the production period and the layout design period, in order to provide customers with samples with a very short turn-around-time. The flexible response made possible through collaboration with GLOBALFOUNDRIES, will secure this, and allow Toshiba to produce samples in five weeks from design hand-off, a fifth of the time required for conventional ASICs.

“The FFSATM product series is one of our key strategic LSIs,” said Masakazu Kakumu, Corporate Vice President, Toshiba Corporation and Executive Vice President, Toshiba Corporation Semiconductor & Storage Products Company. “We decided to partner with GLOBALFOUDRIES to manufacture FFSATM wafers because it allows us to achieve the short turn-around time crucial to FFSATM, for both engineering samples and mass production. It also ensures that we can support high quality and yields with high volume capacity.”

“We are very pleased to have been selected as the primary wafer foundry for Toshiba’s FFSA products,” said Chuck Fox, senior vice president of worldwide sales at GLOBALFOUNDRIES. “With development costs for today’s SoC products becoming out of reach for many companies, Toshiba’s FFSA technology can dramatically reduce development costs and manufacturing cycle times by customizing only a few interconnect layers.”