GlobalFoundries, the former manufacturing arm of AMD, has announced they will have a 28-nanometer high-k metal gate process available in the second half of 2010. GlobalFoundries developed the 28nm process in conjunction with IBM, Chartered Semiconductors, Infineon Technologies, Samsung Electronics, and STMicroelectronics as part of the IBM Technology Alliance. According to The Tech Report, the new process will reportedly enable "40% better performance, over 20% lower power consumption, and 50% smaller die areas" versus the current 45nm process, but it was not mentioned what kind of performance numbers the 28nm process will have compared to the upcoming 32nm process.
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How did GlobalFoundries manage to do this so soon after being established? They're still ordering T-shirts and moving plastic potplants into the office! Well, not quite, but it's quite a big thing to accomplish in such a short period of time... reckon it was really all those other players who did it?
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What I want to know is if they've done anything clever about subthreshold leakage current. Basically, when a transistor is "off", it still conducts. At 180nm, the ratio between "on" (dynamic) current and "off" (static) current was about 1000. At 32nm, they're about equal, meaning that a transistor conducts only about twice as much when on as when it's off. Among other things (like process variation that makes transistor switching characteristics increasingly unpredictable), this is responsible for a slow-down in expected performance and power improvements from smaller geometries.
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I admit to knowing very little about how transistors work, but I think http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-k_dielectric covers at least one way processor manufacturers are reducing leakage current.
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In some instances they will need more aggressive clock gating approaches, where they can isolate parts of the circuit and shut them off completely (although there is a penalty for re-starting that section of the circuit).
A lot of the research seems to be directed into reducing operational temperature, as temperature seems to be one of the principal components of leakage. I.e. cooler circuits = lower leakage.
Although the switching characteristics are not so "random" but there is a clear penalty for "wasted" power due to leakage.
