ARM and GlobalFoundries, the fab that was once AMD’s manufacturing arm, will collaborate on producing 20nm silicon as well as the three-dimensional FinFET gating technology.

This is the second such announcement in less than one month. In July, ARM bagged TSMC as a partner to collaborate on 20nm and beyond with a goal to optimise ARM’s next generation 64-bit processors.

ARM already has a running agreement with IBM to produce a comprehensive design platform all the way down to 14nm.

Mike Noonen, executive vice president at GlobalFoundries, said ““By leveraging our implementation knowledge and applying it to a next-generation, energy-efficient ARM processor and graphics processing unit, we believe we can jointly offer a compelling differentiation to our mutual customers that will power innovation into the next two generations”.

The press release doesn’t mention either the Cortex A15 or any 64-bit ARM processors but it does provide more details about GlobalFoundries’ 20nm-LPM technology, which it says delivers up to 40 per cent performance improvement and twice the gate density of 28nm.