FinFET Technology

FinFET structure

As posted earlier, semiconductor industry attempts to improve the chip on the basis of power, area, cost, speed of operation and time to market. In fact, Moore’s law is all about optimising those parameters by driving to the smallest possible transistor size with each new technology generation. Even though transistor size has been decreasing , recently certain parameters like power-supply voltage are not achieving similar scaling. Furthermore, optimising one parameter might exacerbate other parameters and ultimately the whole design.

In case of planar transistor technology, as we scale, the effect of leakage current due to

Single atom transisitor

A controllable transistor engineered from a single phosphorus atom has been developed by researchers at the University of New South Wales, Purdue University and the University of Melbourne. The atom, shown here in the center of an image from a computer model, sits in a channel in a silicon crystal. The atomic-sized transistor and wires might allow researchers to control gated qubits of information in future quantum computers. (Purdue University image)

A single atom transistor has been developed by the international team of researchers at University of New South Wales, Purdue University, University of Melbourne and the University of Sydney. It is the first time that a single atom transistor has been controllably engineered with atomic precision.

The same group of researchers has developed the phosphorous wire which is one atom tall and four atoms wide which behave like copper wire. This development pushes the limit to the fact how small transistors can go. It is considered as an important development which could contribute to the development of quantum computers.

Click here to know the details.

Current Problems faced by chipmakers

For decades, microprocessors followed Moore’s law and provided better performance and low cost. This made the computing devices faster and affordable. However, recently it requires an arduous effort to achieve a small improvement in performance of the microprocessor.

Following are some of the problems being faced by the chipmakers:

•   As a result of Moore’s law, more transistors are present in the same area. This increased the power density  (power consumed by per unit area of a processor) considerably. To make sure that temperature of the chip doesn’t damage the transistors, clock frequency hasn’t changed much in recent years. Performance has been enhanced by using multiple cores and increasing the average number of instructions that are implemented in one clock cycle.
•  Even though the size of the transistor is being reduced, experts are not sure how long Moore’s law will be followed in the industry. Further, some parts of a chip like metal layer and I/O are not scaling at the same rate. As a result, some chipmakers are focusing on techniques like 2.5D  & 3D packaging of multiple chips to increase bandwidth and reduce power consumption.
•  The cost of R&D and lithography become higher for technology beyond 28nm. New lithography tools that use the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) is still expensive that will increase the cost of manufacturing, if adopted for manufacturing.

About this blog

The blog Future Chip is about challenges faced by today’s microprocessor designer and technological development in the development of processors.

Researchers work at various levels to improve the reliability and performance. They try to manufacture fastest possible transistor and logic gates, improve the microarchitecture or make changes in instruction set architecture. For many years, chip developers have been following Moore’s law, doubling the transistor count every 18-24 months.

However, we are reaching maximum performance in terms of power, cost, speed and reliability that current technology can offer. As a result, researchers are working day and night to find solutions to the problem without compromising cost, speed and power consumption.

However, we are reaching maximum performance in terms of power, cost, speed and reliability that current technology can offer. As a result, researchers are working day and night to find solutions to the problem without compromising cost, speed and power consumption.

I will be posting about various approaches to augment chip’s performance by scientists from all parts of this planet.

First blog post

Hello everyone, I started this blog to know more about microprocessor, which is now present in billion of devices today. Here you will find some of the techniques that can be used in future chips to make them more affordable and efficient.