GlobalFoundries used the topping-out of its SPRINT expansion in Dresden to unveil FDX Fusion, a next-generation FD-SOI process platform aimed squarely at what the industry calls Physical AI: chips that sense, decide and act inside robots, vehicles and industrial systems rather than in a data centre.
The €1.1 billion SPRINT project — whose construction phase GlobalFoundries says finished on schedule and on budget — is designed to lift the Dresden site's annual output beyond one million 300 mm wafers by the end of 2028, which the company says would make Dresden Europe's largest foundry site. The Saxony fab already produces up to 950,000 wafers a year, employs around 3,000 people and has absorbed more than €10 billion of investment since 2009. Exyte is the general contractor.
The expansion is backed by the European Union, the German federal government and the Free State of Saxony under the European Chips Act framework. GlobalFoundries says the added capacity will also let it offer Europe-only processes and data flows for customers with strict security requirements, including critical infrastructure and aerospace.
FDX Fusion is the technical headline. Sitting on the company's fully depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) roadmap, it targets 7nm-class digital performance — single-digit-nanometre, in GF's framing — while keeping analog, mixed-signal, embedded memory and high-performance RF on the same die. GF calls it the first process technology in Europe to deliver that class of digital performance specifically optimised for the physical world, purpose-built for STAC workloads: sense, think, act, communicate.
For the first generation, GF promises more than twice the density of its first-generation FDX technology, RF performance up to 0.5 THz ft/fmax, low-leakage operation, in-memory computing, embedded non-volatile memory and dense logic. Target applications include edge inference, robotics, industrial automation, autonomous systems, sensor-fusion architectures and intelligent connected devices across automotive, consumer and industrial markets.
The roadmap is staged: demonstrator silicon for early customer evaluation in early 2027, an initial process design kit in mid-2027, and manufacturing in Dresden in 2028. GF says development depends on approval under the upcoming IPCEI Advanced Semiconductor Technologies programme. Infineon is already working with GF on 7nm-class FDX Fusion for next-generation radar and wireless products, and the company says Bosch, NXP, Siemens and Tesla — along with BMW — have signalled requirements spanning robotics, trusted edge processing and supply-chain resilience. Customers will be able to draw on GF's MIPS and ARC processor IP, the RISC-V instruction set and application-specific design capabilities.
