tag: finFETs

Crunch Time
By Ed Sperling - 05 Apr, 2012 - Comments: 0

Never have so many things conspired to make design so difficult—at least not at the same time. At the center of this cornucopia of challenges is power, because more functions and more things now have to fit into a power budget that remains fixed. While some components in a complex SoC may run at lower voltages, you can be assured that others will run hotter and at higher voltages—at leas... » read more

Thinking Differently About Power
By Ed Sperling - 12 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Battery life and lower electricity bills are now marketing tools for makers of SoCs, the mobile devices they go into, and servers that power data centers. A smart phone battery that lasts through the day without a charge, even when the user is playing high-action games, is a lot more attractive than one lasting only a few hours. And a data center electricity bill that shows a sh... » read more

Off The Planar
By Ed Sperling - 15 Dec, 2011 - Comments: 0

By Pallab Chatterjee 3D devices, FinFETs and new memory technologies are not just a future direction anymore. They’re real. That became evident at this year’s IEDM conference, where the focus of a number of sessions was on modeling, failure and reliability models, as well as lower power supply operations for these devices. Because FinFETs are not standard 2D MOS devices, their use i... » read more

Five Important Changes That Will Affect Power
By Ed Sperling - 03 Nov, 2011 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling So far most of the energy savings in SoCs have been achieved using two main approaches—turning off most of the chip most of the time, and changing the materials used to insulate against current leakage. Over the next few years, changes to designs will be more radical, encompass more pieces of a bigger system, and they will be orders of magnitude more effective. From a marke... » read more

Experts At The Table: Mobile Design Challenges
By Ed Sperling - 21 Oct, 2011 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Low-Power Engineering sat down to discuss the increasing challenges of designing for mobile devices with Qi Wang, technical marketing group director at Cadence; Cary Chin, director of technical marketing for low-power solutions at Synopsys; Bernard Murphy, CTO of Atrenta; and Dave Reed, senior director of marketing at SpringSoft. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. ... » read more

Interconnect Power II
By Barry Pangrle - 08 Sep, 2011 - Comments: 0

Barry Pangrle After submitting last month’s blog, I read a very interesting article by Deepak Sekar analyzing Intel’s 22 nm FinFET technology versus a hypothetical planar 22nm CMOS technology. Beyond the advantages of being able to use a 140 mV reduction in the supply voltage for the trigate technology, Deepak did a breakdown analysis for the predicted power across a representative micropr... » read more

Extending Battery Life
By Ed Sperling - 21 Jul, 2011 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling In the past it was all about clock frequency. People bought the latest computer and frequently paid a premium because it could crunch numbers faster. But as computing moves from the desktop into handheld devices, that focus is radically changing. Low-Power Engineering caught up with Mark Bohr, senior fellow and director of Intel’s process architecture and integration, to ta... » read more

One On One: ARM CTO Mike Muller
By Ed Sperling - 01 Jul, 2011 - Comments: 0

LPE: How far does Moore’s Law extend forward and what are we likely to encounter along the way? Muller: The good news is there is no known solution for 7nm. That implies that between now and then it’s okay. When I talk to people they seem fairly confident they’re going to get there. Exactly how they don’t know. Will there be any miracles needed? Yes, probably one or two. But 14nm and ... » read more

5 Ways To Cut Power
By Ed Sperling - 16 Jun, 2011 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Low energy consumption with minimal leakage has emerged as the most competitive element in an IC design, regardless of whether it involves a plug, a battery, or whether it’s powered by a gasoline engine. While components on an SoC aren’t always power-aware, they’ll have to be in the future as consumers focus first on energy efficiency. With rising fuel costs, a concern ... » read more

Tri-Gate’s Fallout
By Ed Sperling - 26 May, 2011 - Comments: 0

By David Lammers Intel Corp. dropped a rock into the pond of transistor technology when it announced its 22nm tri-gate technology in San Francisco earlier this month. The ripples continue to move out from that event, with impacts on IDMs, foundries, and fabless semiconductor companies being closely studied. Now that Intel has come out of the closet with its tri-gate technology, “the found... » read more

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