GlobalFoundries' CTO Gregg Bartlett tells EE Times Europe why legacy nodes, power GaN, and MRAM still drive real-world innovation - and how imec helps fuel that mission.
www.eetimes.eu, Aug. 25, 2025 –
At ITF World 2025, GlobalFoundries CTO Gregg Bartlett delivered a provocative message: The semiconductor industry has overhyped Moore’s Law and underinvested in the foundational technologies that underpin the modern world. “Moore’s Law gets too much airtime,” Bartlett said in his keynote. “Nodes like 130 nm and 90 nm may seem outdated, but they’re still essential technologies, and they’ve even evolved.”
In an exclusive interview, Bartlett reinforced the vision he’d offered his keynote audience at the conference, held in Antwerp, Belgium, in May. “If I have one goal,” he told EE Times Europe, “it’s to kill terms like ‘legacy’ and ‘more than Moore.’ They’re no longer meaningful. “Technologies like GaN and silicon photonics don’t scale along Moore’s trajectory. They require different innovation models—and different partners.”
Since exiting the 7-nm race in 2018, GlobalFoundries has focused its R&D on what Bartlett calls essential technologies: nonvolatile memories, such as MRAM and RRAM; RF and power GaN; and silicon photonics. These technologies enable platforms for edge AI, automotive radar, data center power delivery, and secure mobile transactions. “We’ve actually increased our 130-nm capacity in recent years,” Bartlett said. “It supports 150-V battery management systems, which are mission-critical for electric vehicles.”
Bartlett illustrated how a single platform evolved from crypto-mining ASICs to Wi-Fi, millimeter-wave RF, and embedded MRAM—and is now used in silicon-28-based quantum research. “It’s a Swiss Army knife of essential features,” he said. “That’s the kind of utility you get from mature, flexible technologies.”
At the heart of this transformation is imec, Belgium’s nano-electronics powerhouse. “This is our deepest and most successful research partnership globally,” Bartlett told EE Times Europe. “When we pivoted away from Moore’s Law, they adapted with us. Luc [Van den hove, imec president and CEO] and his team have been phenomenal.”
The collaboration includes joint programs on MRAM, RRAM, power GaN, and silicon photonics. The two organizations also exchange wafers for prototyping. “We supply wafers to imec, and we get wafers from imec. That kind of prototyping loop is incredibly valuable,” Bartlett said.
A striking example of the depth of this partnership came when export controls disrupted GlobalFoundries’ GaN supply chain. “Our Chinese vendor suddenly stopped shipping wafers,” Bartlett said. “Imec stepped in and used their own epi reactor to supply us with GaN wafers. That wasn’t part of their business model; they just did it because we asked. That’s part relationship, part culture.”
Bartlett attributed part of this responsiveness to personal continuity. “We joined imec shortly after we spun off from AMD, around 2010,” he said. “And we recently renewed our agreement through 2028. Imec has been a steadfast R&D partner all along. When we pivoted away from Moore’s Law scaling and toward what we now call essential technologies, they adapted their model to align with our shift.”
Bartlett highlighted how imec’s research model is uniquely international and collaborative. “In the U.S., R&D funding is more local and fragmented. Imec runs a multi-participant, open ecosystem. That’s much more effective for our work,” he said.
GlobalFoundries supports this model through its in-house Jedi program, placing postdoctoral engineers at imec for several years before rotating them to GF sites in Dresden, Singapore, or Malta. “These aren’t just tech transfers; they’re relationship builders,” Bartlett said. “The human connections endure.”
As Europe pushes for sovereignty in semiconductors, Bartlett sees GlobalFoundries playing a pivotal role. “Our Dresden site will soon be the largest fab in Europe,” he said. “We’re ready to expand. We just need final approvals.”
GlobalFoundries is also committed to imec’s new research facilities in Spain and Germany, including the upcoming automotive center in Heilbronn. “We’ll definitely participate there. Automotive is a core focus for us,” Bartlett said. “And we’re keeping a close eye on imec’s new site in Malaga to assess where we might contribute.”
Bartlett praised Europe’s commitment to semiconductor investment, including what might become the European Chips Act 2.0. “The EU is ahead of the U.S. in discussing the next generation of incentives,” he noted.
Advanced packaging and heterogeneous integration featured heavily in Bartlett’s keynote and in his interview comments. “Chiplets aren’t just about GPUs,” he told EE Times Europe. “Zonal automotive architectures will need 3D integration of low-power logic and high-frequency analog. That’s our sweet spot.”
Bartlett revealed to EE Times Europe that GlobalFoundries is developing stacked systems combining 22FDX (22-nm fully-depleted silicon-on-insulator) logic with silicon-germanium components for future 140-GHz automotive radar. “We’re already working on the building blocks today,” he said. “You can’t get to those frequencies monolithically.”
He also addressed AI’s impact. “For edge AI, we benefit directly from our work with imec on MRAM and resistive RAM,” Bartlett told EE Times Europe. “Resistive RAM offers a lower-cost solution, while MRAM gives us high reliability for mission-critical inference workloads.”
And for data center AI, the story isn’t about logic scaling but about efficient power delivery and photonic interconnects. “GaN for power management and silicon photonics for 800-Gbps links—these are where the challenges lie,” he said.
Sustainability is integral to GlobalFoundries’ strategy, Bartlett said. “One of the principles of our sustainability strategy is our ‘Journey to Zero,’ which describes our continuous improvement to minimize environmental impacts,” he said. “For carbon, that would be our long-term goal to achieve net zero. In the short term, we just increased our ambition level to 42% reduction by 2030.”
Here, too, imec plays a key role: “They’ve established a dedicated sustainability program, focused on rigorous metrics and materials innovation,” Bartlett said. “We’re deeply engaged.”
Bartlett’s message was clear: The industry must redefine what it means by advanced. “Silicon photonics, power GaN, embedded memory—these are advanced technologies,” he said. “They’re not about dimensions. They’re about systems, materials, and physics. And they’re indispensable.”
For GlobalFoundries, essential doesn’t mean outdated. It means enduring innovation—and the company is betting that with imec as a partner, this approach will shape the future of electronics.