News Article
Saxony's cool silicon
Innovations from Dresden for 28 nanometre
Future state-of-the-art technologies for the design and production of energy efficient and yet particularly high-performing analogue-digital circuits are developed by the Saxon Leading-Edge Cluster "Cool Silicon". Among other things they will contribute to significantly decreasing the power consumption of integrated circuits which are produced in large quantities for the application in mobile communications.
The research project "Design and Technology Platform for the Design of Highly Efficient Integrated High- Frequency Circuits in 28 Nanometer CMOS (Cool-RF-28)" is a cooperation of the chip manufacturer GLOBALFOUNDRIES, the Intel Mobile Communications GmbH, the TU Dresden chair for Circuit Design And Network Theory (LSN) headed by Professor Dr. Frank Ellinger, and the chair for Highly-Parallel VLSI-Systems and Neuromorphic Circuits, headed by Dr.-Ing. habil. René Schueffny. The project is coordinated by Dr. Carta, LSN.
The research project aims at enabling the design and production of circuits combining analog and digital components in 28 nanometer CMOS technology. Suchlike circuits are currently produced with structures of 90 and 65 nanometers. Foregoing the 45 nanometer step, the Dresden-based team wants to drive the miniaturization forward significantly.
"Compared to the current state-of-the-art the 28 nanometer CMOS technology opens the doors for a significantly lower energy consumption as well as considerably higher working frequencies", Professor Dr. Frank Ellinger, the coordinator of the research project, explains. Yet it usually is other types of circuits that set the pace for technological development. The miniaturization of the structures, the so-called scaling, starts with the memory chips and the processors. Along with new technologies those complex digital structures are produced the quickest and therefore design kits for them are available very early. "Components for high-performance analog functions are usually not available at the time of the implementation of new CMOS technologies", Ellinger elaborates. "Hence, there are no optimized passive components or high-frequency bipolar transistor models providing the accuracy necessary for narrow band high-frequency circuits."
To change that is the aim of the participating scientists. Within "Cool Silicon" they develop optimized passive components and high-frequency models for key components.
"Cool-RF-28 contains improvements on technology, modeling, and circuit level", says Ellinger. "The constant feedback between the levels is a crucial part - only with this information the technology can be optimized sustainably." Therefore the researchers are going to work parallely on the production methods, the design kit, the modeling and simulations as well as the testing methods.
The design kit shall be available in 2013; the first test wafers with circuits designed with this innovative tool are going to be produced by the Dresden Fab of GLOBALFOUNDRIES in order to be available to the scientists for further analysis.
In the end, highly efficient high-frequency circuits shall be produced that are needed for modern mobile communications technology as well as for ultrafast millimeter-wave wireless communication technology. The scientists are also developing self-test circuits that enable a cost-effective selection and an optimization of the quality management throughout production. Those three circuit types are used for the verification of the design platform.
Furthermore, the design kit developed in the research project can be combined with a GLOBALFOUNDRIES basic design kit in order to create a System-on-Chip (SoC) design platform. This enables the design of digital and advanced analogue circuits using the same technology from the start. "Our company is among the globally leading contract manufacturers and is very interested in providing the best design support possible for our customers. A SoC design platform for the 28 nanometre technology will significantly strengthen the competitive position of GLOBALFOUNDRIES", Wolfgang Finger, Senior Manager Design Engineering of the GLOBALFOUNDRIES Fab 1 in Dresden, explains.
