Introduction to IC Technology and Moore's Law.

Integrated Circuit Technology

• The first practical MOS IC was implemented at the beginning of 1960. It was implemented using pMOS transistors only and were used in applications, such calculators.
• Intel introduced the first microprocessor in 1972 – 4004 processors and 8008 processor in 1974.
• These processors were based on nMOS only logic, that had the speed advantage over the pMOS only logic since the current carrier in nMOS are electrons that have the higher mobility over the pMOS current carriers – holes.
• Though nMOS logic possessed several advantages it also started to endure the same problem of power dissipation in late 1970’s that has made bipolar logic less attractive.
• CMOS consumes less power and hence it has become quite prominent in the market.
• Gordon Moore published his famous paper “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits”. He predicted that the number of transistor per chip would quadruple every three years.
  

  

  Gordon Moore.

• Gordon Moore, then with Fairchild Corporation, predicted that the number of transistors that can be implemented per chip doubles every one and a half years because of shrinking feature size and growing to die size.
• This prediction became known as Moore’s Law and has been remarkably followed by the semiconductor industry for the last 40 years. Moore’s acknowledged that this law won’t hold true forever.
• Intel is working on new ideas such as SiGe strained silicon and other novel architectures to delay the end of Moore’s Law.

Moore’s Law Version 2:

1. What will we do after his law is no longer applicable?
2. How will we measure trends?
3. Would component density change? NO, it will fairly remain constant.
4. Would performance change? YES, it will. The question is with which metric though?
5. What would be the switching rate, the rise time, access time, and read or write time?

Conclusions that can be drawn:

1. Law will reach its inevitable end.
2. Technology will continue to advance.
3. IC with improved performance will be manufactured.
4. Another metric will be needed to allow future trends to be mapped and predicted.
5. The complexity of IC design means this choice will be difficult.
6. To continue growth in this field it will be necessary to improve the technology both in terms of scaling and processing.
7. We will require combining of two or more different technologies into one to enable us to keep the law alive. BICMOS technology is one of the examples of such a condition where we combine bipolar and MOS devices on the same die.

  ~Jay Mehta

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Jay Mehta.

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