Intel has been making a lot of friends this week. As well as working with industry heavyweights on SSD design and Fortune 500 companies in the cloud, Nikkei Daily (via Reuters) has uncovered a collaboration with Toshiba and Samsung to develop new fabrication technologies.
The goal will be to develop a 10nm manufacturing process for the next generation of CPUs and flash chips. Intel's latest CPUs are based on a 35nm process, while upcoming memory chips - due to be released in the next six months - will be based on 25nm or 22nm processes.
Obviously all of the companies involved have a pretty vested interest in these technologies. Samsung and Toshiba are the top two manufacturers of NAND-type memory chips, while Intel is the number one chipmaker overall, with an increasingly large interest in flash memory.
However, current technology will not allow manufacturers to continue to shrink chips as a way of increasing component density and decreasing power-usage. Though the breakthroughs associated with high-k metal gates have allowed a certain amount of progress to be made, it won't be sufficient beyond around 20nm.
According to the report, the collaboration is expected to be formalised soon, at which point about ten other tech companies will be invited to join. Around half of the ¥10 billion (£78 million) initial research funding will be provided by Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, with the consortium footing the remainder of the bill.
The project is expected to be completed by 2016 and should buy chip makers more time to develop the technologies required for near-atomic scale computing.
