Editor's Blog
The SOI Papers at ISSCC 2011
Posted by Adele HARS on March 11, 2011Tagged with AMD, IBM, ISSCC, Leti, PD-SOI, ST
The International Solid-State Circuits Conference – better known as ISSCC – is of course where the big guns show us their big advances at the chip level. At the most recent conference, held a few weeks ago in San Francisco, advances that leveraged SOI were once again at the forefront.
As always, performance gains generate plenty of buzz. But the SOI papers were also notable for work reducing power consumption, extending scalability and overcoming threshold voltage variation.
IBM presented the world’s highest frequency microprocessor to date, clocking in at 5.2 GHz. On 45nm SOI, it’s the first commercial processor ever to break through the 5GHz speed barrier, and is the centerpiece of Big Blue’s new zEnterprise 196 system.
In another paper, IBM presented the first embedded high-k/metal-gate (HK/MG) SRAM on 32nm SOI enabling operation at down to 0.7V.
AMD presented its Bulldozer 2-core modules, which are on 32nm SOI with HK/MG. Clocking in at 3.5GHz, we’ll see them beginning in desktop and server Fusion chips this year.
In a quieter but clearly significant paper, ST and Leti compared 65nm low power (LP) partially depleted (PD) SOI with standard 65nm LP CMOS bulk. They found that PD-SOI, when combined with a low resistivity produced with forward body bias of the power switch, can reduce leakage current by 52.4% vs. bulk and increase the frequency by 20% at 1.2V, while decreasing power by 30% at 360MHz.
For summaries of additional SOI-based papers at ISSCC and other recent conferences, see ASN’s PaperLinks.
I would like to also point to an interesting presentation, ” Fully-Depleted SOI : An Innovative Technology for Low-VDD/High-Performance Logic”, by Frederic Boeuf from ST. That was part of the ‘Forum’ held just prior to the regular conference sessions (track F2 “Ultra-Low Voltage VLSI for Energy-Efficient Systems”).
The FD-SOI technology is introduced and benchmarked vs the key requirements of advanced Consumer SoC.
Many thanks for catching that one — indeed, it sounds like it would have been a really interesting (and no doubt well-attended) presentation.
Thanks for this proposition. May I ask the link to download this presentation file? Thanks a lot.