Up until recently, IBM Corp. and its secretive chip unit refused to reveal any information about its semiconductor operations.
This remained a closely guarded secret, and Big Blue did not want to give away any information to competitors. But in a recent presentation and fab tour here, IBM’s Microelectronics Group opened the kimono and disclosed the inner workings of its most advanced 300-mm fab, which is called Building 323.
During the presentation, IBM revealed that it will not deploy high-k dielectric materials for logic chip production until the 32-nm node. It was widely believed that IBM and its partners, namely Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), could bring out high-k as early as the 45-nm node.
