The LETI and STMicro have demonstrated a DSP that can hit 500 MHz while pulling just 460mV – that’s ten times better than anything the industry’s seen so far. Implemented on a 28nm FD-SOI technology, with ultra thin forward body biasing (UTFBB) capability (used to decrease Vth), this DSP can also be exercised at higher voltage when… Read More
A Brief History of STMicroelectronics
STMicroelectronics is the result of the 1987 marriage between famed semiconductor companies SGS Microelettronica of Italy and Thomson-CSF Semiconductor of France. You may recognize the name SGS-Thomson which was replaced by STMicroelectronics in 1998. After the merger SGS-Thomson was ranked as number 14 in the top 20 semiconductor… Read More
ISSCC: Analog-Digital Converter in FD-SOI
The International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) was last week in San Francisco. Stéphane Le Tual, Pratap Narayan Singh, Christophe Curis, Pierre Dautriche, all from STMicroelectronics presented a paper on A 20GHz-BW 6b 10GS/s 32mW Time-Interleaved SAR ADC with Master T&H in 28nm UTBB FDSOI Technology… Read More
If you still think that FDSOI is for low performance IC only…
…then you should read about this benchmark result showing how digital power varies with process corners, for high-speed data networking chip, not exactly the type of IC targeting mid-performance mobile application. Before discussing the benchmark results, we need to have some background about this kind of ASIC chip. Such a … Read More
Dual Advantage of Intelligent Power Integrity Analysis
Often it is considered safer to be pessimistic in estimating IR-drop to maintain power integrity of semiconductor designs; however that leads to the use of extra buffering and routing resources which may not be necessary. In modern high speed, high density SoCs having multiple blocks, memories, analog IPs with different functionalities… Read More
What will drive MEMS to drive I-o-T and I-o-P?
By I-o-P, I mean Internet-of-People- I couldn’t think of anything better than this to describe a technology which becomes your custodian for everything you do; you may consider it as your good companion through life or an invariably controlling spy. This is obvious with the embedded sensor techno-products such as Kolibree, a … Read More
Why SOI is the Future Technology of Semiconductor
No doubt that FDSOI generate high interest these days and I found a very interesting contribution from Zvi Or-Bach, President and CEO of MonolithIC 3D, Inc. Zvi has accepted to share his wrap-up from IEDM, in a blog for Semiwiki readers. If you remember the long discussion we had in Semiwiki about cost comparison, some comments were… Read More
UTBB FDSOI Devices Featuring 20nm Gate Length
Did you go to IEDM 2013 in Washington DC ? You may have attended to the “Advanced CMOS Technology Platform” chaired by TSMC, and listen to the FD-SOI related presentation “High Performance UTBB FDSOI Devices Featuring 20nm Gate Length for 14nm Node and Beyond”. According with the abstract, this paper is the first time report of “high… Read More
FD-SOI Memories
When people discuss capabilities of leading edge process nodes they tend to focus on digital logic. Microprocessors in particular. But a process requires more than just digital logic and standard cells to be successful. In particular, pretty much every SoC contains a lot of memory so the memory capabilities of a process are important.… Read More
Semicon Technology Advancement – A View From IEDM
As I see the semiconductor industry going through significant changes and advances, yet ironically plagued by a growing perception that the pace of scaling is slowing, I was inclined to take a peek into what the industry experts say about the state of the industry and the future of Moore’s Law. Fortunately, at last week’s International… Read More