FinFET Based Designs: Reliability Verification Implications


Over the past few months, I’ve discussed various challenges associated with finFET-based designs. We all know that finFET devices enable design teams to operate their chips at significantly lower supply voltages with a very tight control on leakage current. But to control the overall power within a tight power budget, the challenge shifts to how the logic design is managed such that the overa... » read more

As Nodes Advance, So Must Power Analysis


By Chetandeep Singh and Ravi Tangirala Smaller geometry nodes offer cost and performance advantages that encourage their adoption. Yet they present a new set of challenges for IC manufacturers: Though transistors are smaller, they leak more current. This is an important issue as the demand for high-performance, battery-operated, system-on-chips (SoC) in communication and computing shifts th... » read more

Reliability Challenges In 16nm FinFET Design


As the IC industry rapidly adopts the 16nm technology node, IC designers are faced with a new wave of reliability challenges. The 16nm node has introduced several changes in the way that the devices are fabricated and how the metal stack-up is built. On one hand designers gain speed, leakage and density improvements. On the other, reliability engineers need to address the narrowing electromigra... » read more

Power Shifts In Digital Chip Space


By Bhanu Kapoor The power issue has been quite disrupting in the digital semiconductor space. The processor architecture shifted to parallel processing with the “power wall” stopping the frequency scaling that the industry had conveniently used in the last few decades. The power issue also is causing semiconductor process technology to change in ways other than simply scaling from one ... » read more

Experts At The Table: FinFET Questions And Issues


By Ed Sperling Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down to discuss the current state and future promise of finFETs, and the myriad challenges, with Ruggero Castagnetti, an LSI fellow; Barry Pangrle, senior power methodology engineer at Nvidia; Steve Carlson, group director of marketing at Cadence; and Mary Ann White, director of product marketing at Synopsys. What follows are excerpts ... » read more

On, Off and Mostly Off


<p>By Ed Sperling</p> <p>System-on-chip architecture has always been about getting the most performance out of a device, and the basic premise is that when you turn on a device it is always on.</p> <p>That approach has been challenged over the past few years with a fundamental shift toward more of the design being in the ‘off’ position. Aside from reversi... » read more

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