At yesterday’s Global Technology Conference in Santa Clara, California, GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ Gregg Bartlett presented a new high performance technology called 28 nm HPP. This is in addition to their gate first HKMG 28 LP, 28 SLP and 28 HP. 

The 28 HPP (HP plus) addresses the growing market for smart mobile devices and high-performance processors requiring more than 2 GHz of processing power. Scheduled to begin risk production in Q4 2011, this technology provides a performance boost of as much as 10% over the company’s current 28 nm High Performance (HP) offering, as well as offering optional ultra-low leakage transistors and SRAMs that extend the application range from high performance into the low power range.

This technology seems to compete with TSMC’s 28 HP(M) – high performance mobile – that was announced at the TSMC symposium in April.

With all these 28 nm process recipes or “HP sauces” on offer, engineers now have plenty of different choices to design high performance and low power devices.

Booting from a solid state drive (SSD) is much faster than the traditional hard disk drives and this is just one of the many reasons that the SSD’s have become popular in consumer devices. To assist developers of these products, one of our partners Global Unichip (GUC) has developed an SSD reference platform for mobile applications such as netbooks, mobile internet devices (MIDs) and high-speed pen drives. The connection to the netbook is made via the high performance SATA bus as shown below.

The GP5080 reference platform, provides developers with a low power, high data system throughput of more than 120 MB/s in sequential read and over 80 MB/s in sequential write with 4-channel NAND Flash access.

Translated into layman’s language this is bags faster than hard disk drives during booting.

Below is a block diagram of the reference platform

As well as the SATA interface, the GP5080 features a 32-bit ARM7 processor.  This provides firmware capability to improve the SSD’s performance in terms of lifetime and reliability by providing higher computing capability such as a flash translation layer, bad block management, wear leveling algorithm and power fail recycling.