interconnect resistance

The metal has done sterling service for 20 years but the time is approaching to find a replacement for copper as problems with parasitics continue to build up, work presented at last month’s IEDM shows. But it's not an obvious switch.

This year's IEDM will feature papers that exploit stacked nanoribbons to reduce CMOS footprint, graphene interconnects that support easier integration, and the variability prospects of 2D semiconductors.

Automated resistance checks mitigate the increasing complexity involved when analyzing voltage drop, ESD and noise, particularly for analog-heavy designs.

At IEDM 2014, CEA-Leti presented a technique that prevents damage to base-layer transistors in monolithic 3DIC processes. As work progresses, the institute is preparing to receive 3DIC designs in 2017.

Design for the 20nm generation of processes has revealed power and clocking issues for the two major FPGA manufacturers presentations at Hot Chips revealed.

Qualcomm is looking to monolithic 3D and smart circuit architectures to make up for the loss of traditional 2D process scaling as wafer costs for advanced nodes continue to increase.