Low Power Strategies for beyond Moore's Law Era: Low Power Device Technologies and Materials

Low Power Strategies for beyond Moore's Law Era: Low Power Device Technologies and Materials

B. Shivalal Patro, Vandana B.
Copyright: © 2016 |Pages: 21
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-0190-9.ch002
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Abstract

Semiconductor industries are facing a lot of problems in designing the chips consist of transistors with less than 10nm technology. Moore's law which predicted the scaling down of semiconductor devices has forced the researchers to look upon the devices in another aspect. So, various architectures and materials are invented to increase the reliability, speed and most importantly low power operation without increasing the size of devices. The on-set of nanotechnology and nano-science leads to unconventional 3D structure devices to and 0-dimensional structures. This chapter gives a general overview of the various technologies; materials and architectures researchers are concentrating to continue the technology beyond Moore's law with low power consumption.
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1. Introduction

Moore’s law: It is the observation by Gordon Moore that the number of transistors in a square inch area for the integrated circuits had doubled every year. But in subsequent years, this enhancement of density has slowed down i.e. doubling in two years but still it will be continue living for another some years.

Traditionally, the MOSFETs are designed in planar structure form to design the integrated circuits ICs. With the down scaling of transistor sizes beyond 45nm technology, introduction of short channel effects come into consideration. This effect hence introduces leakage current which increases the power consumption even at the zero operation state. Also passive power dissipation and non uniformity in device structures and doping concentrations are faced by the fabrication members. These problems are somewhat solved in considerable amount by introduction of multi-gate structure which is explained in below section.

Background

Researchers are also going for various architectures which are something different from present designs of transistors. These new architectures are found to be very good in achieving the most important specifications especially low power implementation of devices in various circuits. Also, silicon on insulator based technologies; materials having high k-dielectric are also source of achieving some of the design constraints like low scaled devices and low power.

With the more demanding of low power as well as compact size devices in market makes the researchers to think more out of box ideas in order to compensate the demands. These ideas strengthen Moore’s law to get extended for further some decades as the size of transistors has to be minimized beyond the optimized level taking silicon as major ingredient of semiconductor. So, different materials exhibiting nearly semiconductor properties especially lower band-gap property have been the source of replacement for the silicon based gates of transistors. Not only that to miniaturize the device and hence the integrated circuits, researchers opted for reducing dimensionality of the devices which can helpful for miniaturizing them.

In this chapter, there is a general overview of various types of modified devices in structures, materials and miniaturizing the dimensions of the semiconductor materials.

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