Globalfoundries CEO Ajit Manocha has praised his firm for what he called a "remarkable quarter" in Q411, and promised that the foundry was on track to "keep the momentum going," after a year plagued with difficulties and setbacks.

Manocha added that Globalfoundries' new fab in upstate New York is due to start ramping imminently, with 20-nm expected to be introduced in June. Manocha also said Globalfoundries' Dresden facility would continue with 32-nm and 28-nm manufacturing, while plans were already underway for 14-nm.

These were among the comments the foundry's executive made during an interview with EE Times.

Manocha also dismissed Globalfoundries' competitor TSMC and its high-k metal gate technology they use for their chips, as only having shipped "a few thousand wafers" with high-k metal gate in 2011," noting that his firm had shipped well over 700, 000.

However the gate-first HKMG has proved particularly difficult to ramp and now the company will need to make another challenging transition as it follows Intel and TSMC to gate-last HKMG at 20-nm. Manocha agreed that scaling from 40-nm to 32-nm had indeed presented a challenge, and that it would be yet another bridge to cross reversing the metal gate going from 28-nm to 20-nm, a bigger challenge, he said, would likely come from the photo lithography side of the process and then moving to 450 mm wafers.