The cost of developing new generations of chip technology are so high that collaboration is increasingly the order of the day, and Advanced Micro Devices Inc and Hewlett-Packard Co have decided to join forces on the development of logic process technology to enable the production of miicroprocessors with 5m to 10m transistors on a single chip by 1995. The two will develop and qualify a general-purpose 0.35-micron CMOS technology by the end of 1994 for volume production the following year, which will involve shrinking the smallest feature sizes on logic chips by more than two times and increase the layers of metal interconnect, increasing the number of transistors that can be integrated on logic devices by a factor of 10 compared with products such as current-generation Am386 devices and Hewlett-Packard’s 99MHz Precision Architecture RISC – the Am386 devices are manufactured in 0.8-micron technology. Advanced Micro says a number of its personnel will be assigned to work on a full-time basis at Hewlett-Packard’s Deer Creek Research and Development Facility in Palo Alto, California over the next two years, although some tasks associated with the project will be handled at Advanced Micro’s Submicron Development Centre in Sunnyvale. Products will be manufactured at Advanced Micro’s previously announced sub-0.5-micron facility which is being built in Austin, Texas.
