Advanced Micro Devices said on Thursday that it had taped out its first products, which will be made using a FinFET process technology. While AMD does not reveal which products it had taped out, it is highly-likely that one of them is a highly-anticipated microprocessor based on “Zen” micro-architecture.
“We have actually just taped-out our first couple of FinFET designs,” said Lisa Su, chief executive officer of Advanced Micro Devices, during the company’s earnings conference call with investors and financial analysts.
Ms. Su did not elaborate which of the future designs the company had taped out and when exactly this happened. Nonetheless, two tape-outs mean that the company has managed to successfully design its first products with FinFET transistors.
Tape-out is the final stage of the design cycle of an integrated circuit, the point at which the artwork of the IC is sent to a maker of photomasks. Once the set of photolithographic masks is ready and verified, it is sent to a contract manufacturer of the chip, which produces the first working samples of the chip. It may take up to several weeks to prepare a mask-set. Production cycle of a complex FinFET processor is around 90 days from wafer start to chip delivery. As a result, if AMD taped out its first FinFET chips in June, then the company will get the first samples of its products in September.
Mass production of chips nowadays starts between nine and twelve months after the initial tape-out. Therefore, if AMD managed to tape-out its chips last months, then it is on-track to start their high-volume production next June or a bit earlier and release its first products made using a FinFET process technology in late Q3 or early Q4 2016.
