Feature Story

Success Through Synergy

Sun and Texas Instruments: Celebrating 15 Years of Mutual Success.

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A 300 mm wafer processed at TI's DMOS 6 fabrication facility.

Sun and Texas Instruments share one of the industry's most successful, mutually beneficial, and long-lasting technology relationships.

Break out the Crystal!
It's time to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the relationship between Sun Microsystems and Texas Instruments. For the last decade and a half, Sun and TI have worked closely together to bring the most advanced semiconductor design and manufacturing technologies to bear on Sun's SPARC® processors. The result? Exceptional benefits for both companies and their customers. The relationship drives the development of advanced process technology that enables both Sun and TI to deliver outstanding products in a crowded field.

A Win-Win Proposition
Back in 1988, Sun needed a manufacturing partner that could provide the sophisticated CMOS process technology required to develop high-end microprocessors. The partner also had to be able to manufacture highly customized SPARC processor designs and support a fabrication process technology roadmap that would keep Sun competitive for years to come. Few contenders existed. Only one made the cut.

Sun management credits the TI technology relationship as one of the reasons the SPARC architecture is thriving even as the microprocessor market has consolidated around a few dominant players over the last decade. Both companies reap significant business benefits from the strategic agreement.

Sun and TI: A mutually-beneficial relationship.

The mutually beneficial relationship offers a wealth of customer benefits to Sun customers:

• Advanced designs and cutting-edge manufacturing processes enable Sun to make processors that help maximize real-world performance, scalability, and reliability.
• Low power consumption and small form factors help reduce system operations costs.
• A joint commitment to binary compatibility across the SPARC line provides critical investment protection.

"This is truly a synergistic relationship for Sun and TI," explains Hunter Ward, Enterprise Products business manager and SPARC engineering manager at TI. "Sun drives our leading-edge process technology from a performance perspective, which enhances our high-performance ASIC business and waterfalls down into our other products over time. Concurrently, we share with Sun lessons learned in producing our very high volume, low-cost, low-power DSP products."

Chipping In to Achieve Excellence
At the core of the successful relationship is an unwavering commitment to advancing SPARC technology. From the start, TI has consistently demonstrated its support for the relationship. When the two companies first began working together, the pair faced a few challenges implementing BiCMOS technology. TI immediately rose to the occasion, turning a revenue-generating DRAM factory upside down in order to deliver its first SPARC processors. A few years later, TI built its DMOS 5 fab in record time to meet Sun's volume demands for the UltraSPARC® II processor.

Today Sun is taking advantage of TI's 130 nm copper process technology on 300 mm wafers in TI's most advanced wafer manufacturing facility. The move to the 90 nm technology node is underway and will yield an improvement in transistor performance of approximately 50 percent, thanks to TI's sophisticated gate dielectric and transistor advancements, including strained silicon. These achievements in process technology coupled with a dedication to outstanding customer support recently earned TI a "Best in Class" Supplier Award from Sun.

TI's DMOS 6 fab in Dallas Texas is ramping to 30K+ wafers per month with its 130 nm process technology. Later this year, it will be adding 90 nm capacity.

TI has a group of engineers and operations managers dedicated to SPARC development. Sun's SPARC processor team interacts daily with this group to co-plan and co-engineer the next generation of processors. Sun engineers push processor logic to its limits while TI engineers develop advanced process technology to transform promising designs into actual production devices. These highly complementary skill sets produce excellent results at each phase of development and production.

Both Sun and TI believe in taking a balanced approach to processor design, wisely allocating the ever-increasing number of available transistors to address the different network computing workloads with multiple design points. Together the companies strive to provide both increased throughput and other enhanced capabilities such as low power consumption and improved memory management�advancements that are essential in achieving the greatest increases in application performance. Sun designs its processors to interact efficiently with other system components for optimal performance. At the same time, TI develops manufacturing processes that provide a healthy balance in terms of high-performance transistor technology, advanced interconnect capabilities, and cost.

"Constant interaction between Sun and TI ensures that everything is aligned for optimal performance, both in terms of system design and manufacturing efficacy," says Ron Melanson, Sun's vice president of engineering.

The companies' cyclical development cycle supports significant technology advancements. TI uses the high-performance transistor technology designed for the latest SPARC processor to create a faster next-generation technology node for use in its DSP products. This new node then serves as the foundation for the next-generation SPARC processor. Over the past 15 years, Sun and TI have developed SPARC products on eight major process technology nodes, advancing from 800 nm BiCMOS to 90 nm CMOS technology. With each reduction in scale, the partners raise the bar, increasing performance and integrating new feature sets while reducing power requirements.

Bringing Vision to Market Executing on Sun's throughput computing strategy, the dual-threaded UltraSPARC IV processor is designed for the critical data-facing workloads of the data center. It is manufactured using TI's state-of-the-art 130nm process technology, and marks the first generation of chip-multithreaded processors from Sun.

A Fab Future
Having already shipped more than 6 million 64-bit UltraSPARC processors, the development partners are now rapidly making advancements in a number of key areas:

• Upcoming throughput processors aim to revolutionize computing by executing tens of threads simultaneously, enabling tremendous increases in data processing performance.
  See www.sun.com/processors/throughput/ for more details.
  
  
• 90 nm and 65 nm copper technologies shrink die sizes, reducing packaging, power, and space requirements. These reductions enable Sun and TI to integrate more features into smaller form factors, helping to cut manufacturing costs and, ultimately, lower total cost of ownership for customers.
  
  
• Strained silicon at 90 nm technology makes it easier for electrons to move, contributing to a 50% increase in TI transistor performance compared to its 130 nm technology.
  
  
• Low-k dielectric insulator layers offer a dramatic performance improvement over older generation materials by increasing the efficiency of the current flow between transistors. Reducing risks of electrical signal leakage and interference problems, low-k dielectric materials can also minimize power dissipation and improve the accuracy of data transmission.
  
  
• 300 mm wafers increase device capacity per wafer, reducing the production cost per die and increasing production efficiency.

By consistently increasing performance, maximizing feature integration, and reducing system operations costs, Sun and TI are ushering in new levels of efficiency for our customers. Fifteen years after its inception, our relationship is stronger than ever. And the best is yet to come. For more information, please visit http://www.sun.com/ultrasparc.

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Milestones in the Sun/TI relationship.

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