GlobalFoundries is expected to start manufacturing next-generation 32-nanometer processors by the middle of next year. GlobalFoundries, the chip-manufacturing spin-off of Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD), officially opened for business Wednesday and laid out its preparations for moving to next-generation 32-nanometer products. The joint venture of AMD and Advanced Technology Investment Co. said it will expand its Dresden, Germany, manufacturing capacity by bringing a second facility online in late 2009. Called Fab 1, the Dresden complex will dedicate one of its two facilities to making 45-nm chips, which AMD is in the process of transitioning its products to, and the other to 32-nm processors. The numbers refer to the size of the microprocessor circuitry. The smaller the size, the more transistors can be placed on a piece of silicon, which translates into much higher performance without increasing power consumption. The move to 32-nm is seen as the next big jump in processor performance. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.

You would be hard-pressed to find a screen today that does not have Internet access. It™s not just the PC and the phone — online content appears in elevators, in the back of taxis and at your airplane seat. Some companies have even tried (albeit unsuccessfully) to get the Internet displayed on a refrigerator door. So how is it that the Internet has largely escaped the single biggest screen in most of our lives — the TV? An intensifying, and perhaps surprising, debate is playing out around this question and others. Should televisions be able to get access to the Web? And not just the thin slices of the Web allowed by a few services, but the whole cacophonous, unregulated, messy thing? And if they should, how should they? Now a movement is afoot by chip makers

Major chipmakers aren't letting the economy drag them down. Instead, they're plotting the next generation of mobile devices. Monday is a national holiday in the U.S., but it will be a busy day in Barcelona, Spain, which is hosting GSMA Mobile World Congress -- one of the largest mobile phone trade conferences. More than 1,300 firms will be represented at the show, and three chipmakers -- Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), ARM and nVidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) -- will be making announcements of new chip products or extended support. ARM, best known as the developer of an embedded processor that licensees can modify for their own product needs, will announce it is making the move to 32 nanometers (nm) with a high-k metal gate process. Both represent advanced technology that ARM can take advantage of because it's a member of IBM's IBM Common Platform alliance, which also includes AMD. ARM Partners will have access to the technology in 2009, with full production release in early 2010.