Infineon: Advanced Cell Phone Chips Test OK

Infineon Technologies moved a step closer to addressing the needs of increasingly feature-rich mobile devices by successfully testing cell phone chips it created using an advanced, 65-nanometer manufacturing technology, the company said on Friday.

The chips, which Infineon says offer high performance with low power consumption, will be available by the end of the year. Testing was done in Duisburg and Munich in Germany and in Bangalore, India. The chips incorporate more than 30 million transistors within a space of 33 square millimeters.

More advanced manufacturing processes allow chip makers to reduce the size of the chips and deliver more processing performance while keeping power consumption low. Mobile devices, especially those using third generation cellular networks, offer increasingly more functionality, such as music downloads and video creation. The added features require more processing strength and soak up more power, issues that mobile phone makers are trying to address.

Infineon produced the first sample chips using the 65-nanometer technology in February. The number refers to the smallest circuitry features etched on the surface of the chips. It developed the chips as part of a research alliance with IBM, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing and Samsung Semiconductor.

Qualcomm, a major mobile phone chip supplier, said in April it was sampling certain chips using 65-nanometer technology. Texas Instruments, which supplies chips for Nokia, sampled some mobile phone chips using 65-nanometer technology early last year and is developing more.

-Nancy Gohring, IDG News Service

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