Power Issues Grow For Cloud Chips


Performance levels in traditional or hyperscale data centers are being limited by power and heat caused by an increasing number of processors, memory, disk and operating systems within servers. The problem is so complex and intertwined, though, that solving it requires a series of steps that hopefully add up to a significant reduction across a system. But at 7nm and below, predicting exactly... » read more

Understanding The Effect Of Variability In Bulk FinFET Device Performance


2-D MOSFETs have proven difficult to scale down to 20nm and beyond. In their place, 3D FinFET transistors have emerged as novel devices that can scale down to lower node sizes. 10nm process finFETs are for SoC product mass production, and research is progressing towards a 7nm process finFET. FinFET transistors provide lower dynamic power consumption (due to flatter I-V curves), improved control... » read more

Electromagnetic Crosstalk Considerations In Low Power Designs


By Magdy Abadir, Padelis Papadopoulos, and Yehea Ismail
 Power consumption continues to be a critical design metric in high-performance mobile electronics. In order to meet the aggressive power budget targets, chips today need to operate at extremely low power levels, which increases the critical signals’ susceptibility to electromagnetic (EM) crosstalk effects. Because a low-power So... » read more

The Return Of Body Biasing


Body biasing is making a comeback across a wide swath of process nodes as designers wrestle with how to build mobile devices with more functionality and longer battery life. Consider an ultra-low-power IoT device with a wireless sensor, for example, which is meant to last for years without changing a battery. Body biasing can be used to create an ultra-low-leakage sleep state. “In that ... » read more

Choosing Power-Saving Techniques


Engineers have come up with a long list of ways to save power in chip and system designs, but there are few rules to determine which approaches work best for any given design. There is widespread confusion about what techniques should be used where, which IP or subsystem is best, and how everything should be packaged together. The choices include everything from the proper level of clock and... » read more

Plotting The Next Semiconductor Road Map


The semiconductor industry is retrenching around new technologies and markets as Moore's Law becomes harder to sustain and growth rates in smart phones continue to flatten. In the past, it was a sure bet that pushing to the next process node would provide improvements in power, performance and cost. But after 22nm, the economics change due to the need for multi-patterning and finFETs, and th... » read more

FinFET Scaling Reaches Thermal Limit


In 1974, Robert H. Dennard was working as an IBM researcher. He introduced the idea that MOSFETs would continue to work as voltage-controlled switches in conjunction with shrinking features, providing doping levels, the chip's geometry, and voltages are scaled along with those size reductions. This became known as Dennard's Law even though, just like Moore's Law, it was anything but a law. T... » read more

Internet of FD-SOI Things?


Are fully-depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) wafers having a moment? Certainly SOI wafers are not new. Soitec’s SmartCut layer transfer technology was patented in 1994, and wafers with implanted oxide layers were available before that. Still, adoption of SOI wafers has been limited. Though they offer improved device isolation and reduced parasitics, the increased wafer cost has been an ob... » read more

Tech Talk: 14nm And Stacked Die


Aashish Malhotra, marketing director for the ASIC Business Unit at GlobalFoundries, talks about 14nm process technology, the IP ecosystem, and why that technology node will be used as a platform for 2.5D and 3D stacked die across a wide range of markets including the Internet of Everything. [youtube vid=ukTRuedB7ZU] » read more

Moore’s Law Reset?


GlobalFoundries today took the wraps off its 22nm FD-SOI process, promising to extend Moore's Law technologically without altering the economic equation—at least for the next couple of process nodes. Subramani Kengeri, vice president of global design solutions at [getentity id="22819" comment="GlobalFoundries"], said 22nm FD-SOI will provide the same 30% improvement in PPA that has been c... » read more

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