SAN FRANCISCO -- At this week's International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) here, Fujitsu, NEC and Toshiba rolled out 32-nm processes.

Fujitsu Ltd. (Tokyo) disclosed the development of a CMOS process for 32-nm designs and beyond. In a paper, the company did not say if it had devised a high-k/metal-gate solution for the new process.

The new technology does employ a silicon crystal surface technology. A thermal treatment is applied prior to forming the gate-insulating layer. This in turn changes the shape of the boundary between the silicon and the gate-insulating layer, according to Fujitsu.

Fujitsu also discovered that implanting aluminum after forming silicide reduces contact resistance between NMOS silicide and silicon. Combining this with silicon surface-treatment technology makes it possible to use a silicon substrate with good NMOS on-current levels, according to Fujitsu.

''As a result, the technology makes it possible to use current 45-nm generation fabrication facilities to reduce LSI power voltage without lowering operation speed, thereby containing production costs and cutting LSI power consumption during operation by approximately 20 percent,'' according to Fujitsu.

It is anticipated that the technology can be used in a wide range of applications, such as system LSIs for various mobile devices that will need to be increasingly multi-functional, and for microprocessors of which many are running with multiple processing cores.

Another chip maker, Japan's Toshiba Corp., rolled out a 32-nm CMOS platform technology. The platform technology is based on a 32-nm process technology developed jointly with NEC Electronics Corp.

The platform was achieved by application of advanced single exposure lithography and gate-first metal gate/high-k process technology. This technology enables a 0.124-micron² SRAM cell and a gate density of 3,650 gate/mm².

Toshiba also announced a 40-nm CMOS platform technology, which was co-developed with NEC Electronics. The new platform fabricates system-on-chip (SOC) products for power-critical mobile applications.