It’s no secret that the clock speeds of processors have hit a glass ceiling. But until the latest iteration of the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, we still expected them to increase by close to 10 per cent a year. Not anymore. The slow rise has been replaced by…
The 2011 International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS), finalised late last year, has been publicly released. The roadmap looks at the problems facing the chipmaking industry from now until 2026 and includes some updates that focus on low-power design. The slides prepared by Andrew Kahng on design, for example…
One of the biggest contributors to leakage power in advanced processes is variability and the need to use guard banding to avoid having a chip fail because critical paths wind up in ‘cold’ high-delay parts of the die.
At the International Electron Device Meeting (IEDM) this week, researchers from…
It’s the 40th anniversary of the Intel 4004 today, the microprocessor that kicked off the microprocessor revolution. Built on NMOS, it suffered ‘leakage’ far more heavily than any of today’s processors and its power consumption figures put in perspective just how far the industry has come.
With an…
The emphasis of the IEDM conference is shifting away from peak speed to more of a tradeoff between power and performance, with several papers reflecting the need to move away from traditional transistor metrics such as current drive.
Process variability does not immediately sound as though it has an impact on low-power design, but it has several insidious consequences. And it’s gradually getting to be more of a problem. Variability causes higher power consumption because of the way it can shift the threshold voltage, which can…
Mainstream CMOS process development is a little like Highlander: there can be only one. It matters which choices other chipmakers make because they will control how quickly the industry as a whole can get down the yield learning curve – and how much the end product costs. It is possible to…
The Design Automation Conference, which returns to San Diego this year, is now less than a month away and has put together a programme that includes coverage of low-power design issues. Tuesday 7 June has a panel that attempts to work out who in the design chain can make…