SemiSerious

Once again last week, the organizers of the VLSI Technology and Circuit Symposia organizers supplied me with this year’s abstracts and conference summary. As always, there are a lot of great papers with all geographic regions well-represented. For today’s blog, I will start a series of posts about which papers and technologies to watch for June 12 to 14 in Kyoto.

45nm and high-K metal gate have been the hot topics ever since Intel and IBM announced them for their respective high performance CMOS logic platforms, so I will start with 45nm logic today. There are many interesting papers planned for VLSI Tech related to technologies for 45nm logic. IBM and IMEC are the best represented organizations. There are no Intel logic papers at all. You can find out about Intel 45nm from a platform perspective with some awesome videos from Scoble at PodTechNews. This video is the edited celebration of Intel’s success driving Moore’s Law. You can also get the “fab” tour from Mark Bohr, the device testing lab, Kaizad Mistry in the bunny suit, and the whole 45nm MPU line-up. Back to VLSI, there are a smattering of contributions from AMD, Fujitsu, NEC, Renesas and Toshiba as well.

The highlight session will feature one IBM presentation that is bound to generate interest. “High Performance Transistors Featured in an Aggressively Scaled 45nm Bulk CMOS technology” describes an allegedly world-leading drive current performance of 1150µA/µm for NFET and 785µA/µm for PFET. Just as an aside, I should point out that a Samsung paper promises 1620µA/µm for NFET. It is interesting to me that IBM is describing a bulk rather than SOI technology for 45nm. IBM has produced SOI IC’s at both 130 and 90nm. The interconnect scheme features ultra low-K of 2.4. The gate material is not mentioned.

In fact, there are no IBM papers that mention the gate material. Many other presenters will, however. That list includes IMEC, National university of Singapore, and Samsung. The commonality among these is that they will all discuss various flavors of FUSI or fully-silicided poly as opposed to metal gate structures. It would appear that the FUSI concept is not only alive and well but has a large following in the industry.

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