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Texas Instruments announced late in October 2004 that it had qualified its advanced 90nm copper process on 300mm wafers in its DMOS6 facility. The result of the migration of the 90nm process to 300mm wafers allows TI to deliver up to 2.4 times more die per wafer over 200mm, and reduces production costs 30 - 40 percent. The first products to result from the qualified 90nm, 300mm process include wireless baseband processors for advanced mobile handset devices.

"TI remains at the forefront of bringing the most advanced semiconductor manufacturing technologies to volume production," said Kevin Ritchie, Senior Vice President of Texas Instruments and Director of Worldwide Manufacturing. "As one of the first to qualify 90nm process technology on 300mm wafers, TI is continuing its commitment to bring our customers products with market- leading performance, power consumption, integration and cost."

The 90nm process features transistor gates as small as 37nm with nine layers of copper metal and its advanced integration capability supports a wide range of analog and RF components, including Digital Radio Processor (DRP) architecture. The process delivers a 50 percent improvement in transistor performance over its fastest 130nm transistor, according to the company

TI's 90nm process uses a collection of transistors that are "tuned" for different functions on-chip to meet a variety of performance, density and power consumption requirements. This is accomplished through adjustments to the transistors' gate length, threshold voltage, gate oxide thickness or bias conditions.  The result is that transistors with the highest performance can be used for critical functions such as signal processing, while transistors with lower power consumption can be used to support functions with lower active performance requirements.

TI delivered its first 90nm device in January 2003 from its 200mm KFAB facility, and has nearly 20 different products based on the 90nm process in various stages of production.