Well! IBM and AMD are certainly proud of themselves today! They’ve been working on a 22nm SRAM cell, two generations ahead of the current 45nm process.
The devices developed and manufactured by AMD, Freescale, IBM STMicroelectronics, Toshiba and the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE) were built in a traditional six-transistor design on a 300 mm wafer and had a memory cell size of just 0.1 μm2, which compares to Intel’s 45 nm SRAM cell size (the test chip that was used for today’s 45 nm processors) of 0.346 μm2.
Bad news for Intel, right? Well, kind of. But they’re unfazed. An Intel spokesperson downplayed the advance, in my opinion successfully:
“A single SRAM cell has 6 transistors in it. Intel’s 32 nm SRAM array, which we announced back in September, has 290 million cells or bits, and a total of 1.9 billion transistors.”
Oh, daisies! Basically Intel is saying “yeah they’ve got a single weak-ass 22nm cell, who cares? We could do that any time we want, but in the meantime we’re miles ahead of you in the sector that matters.”