Grand designs [IC design]

Engineers will soon be designing ICs with hundreds of millions of transistors. Philips Semiconductors, in a $1.4 collaboration with STMicroelectronics (ST) and Motorola are staying in the advanced CMOS business with a common CMOS process at a plant in Crolles, France. Over five years, the process will take feature sizes down to an extraordinary 32 nm. Each company will develop its own variant of the process, but for Philips the emphasis will be on low cost and low power.