Oscar Wilde in his 1889 essay "The Decay of Lying' said that "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life'. I do not know about art but from my perspective as a semiconductor industry professional I can say that a technology node does imitate life. Just as a person goes through various different roles in life through the ages, so does a process technology node. As exhibit A, I present the humble 180nm technology node, the work-horse of the semiconductor industry. Think it's a 'has been' node? Think again: it's powering key features in hot new smart mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets with more than the cutting-edge nodes.
When I first joined ARM as an engineer in 2004, the 180nm node was a pretty 'hot' node. The node was still in the ramp-up stage and was often used to build chips with pretty complex (by 2004 standards) digital circuitry. The end applications could be networking-wire-line and wireless, graphics and multimedia processors or any other typical consumer devices needing processing power. There was also a limited choice in terms of process flavors. Most foundries offered only the baseline G (general-purpose) or a LP (low-power) process and that sufficed for pretty much most customers. The 180nm node was a highly successful node for ARM. We developed physical IP platforms for more than that continue to generate substantial royalty revenues for us till this date.
Fast forward to today and you see the 180nm node all grown up and mature. The 180nm node of today is nothing like the 180nm node of 2004. In fact the market opportunity for the 180nm node is bigger today than at any time in the past.
Just the other day I was playing with my newest smartphone and curiosity led me to research the teardown report for that phone. What I realized was that some of the most useful features in these super phones that make these phones really cool are made possible by 180nm technology- touch-screens(touch-screen controllers), super-bright LCD screens (LED Driver ICs) as well as long battery life (power management ICs). So while the latest most advanced semiconductor nodes are often reserved for the performance critical device functions, they only account for a few of the chips (1-2) in a smartphone. In most smartphones, there are more chips made with a mature semiconductor technology (3-4) than with the latest and greatest technology node.
More or less the same technology used in smartphones is also used in the other hot trend today: tablet computers - and these two trends are just taking off. So putting two and two together, you can imagine how many more 180nm wafers are going to get shipped over the next few years. These gadgets didn't exist five years ago so essentially a new market has been created from scratch which uses not just the most leading edge 28nm technology but also 180nm. Isn't that super cool?
What's the reason for the resurgence of 180nm technology? There are several factors but the prime reason is that 180nm technology has been around long enough that it is well understood and is seen as low risk. More ever it is also widely available and cheap to manufacture. Remember that most of these mixed-signal chips sell for a few dollars each, so every cent saved in manufacturing them is profit that goes straight to the bottom line. The fact that semiconductor foundries have continued to invest in developing value adding technology like embedded flash and low leakage process modules on 180nm have motivated all the chip designers to consider migrating down from 350nm to 180nm.
We can only speculate for now on the market for these emerging applications or on what new applications will emerge in the near future but what is certain is that 180nm technology will play a pretty important role in bringing these applications to market and that ARM will continue to be successful on that semiconductor technology node.