IC Implementation

The 14nm and 16nm processes cover a range of technologies and are designed to succeed the 20nm generation. They bring with them a number of design challenges.

A number of effects have led to a dramatic increase in interconnect resistance in the sub-32nm process nodes that demands the use of smarter routing.

Increasingly complex design rules in 14nm and 16nm make it harder to connect local routing to the inputs and outputs (pins) of standard cells.

IEEE 1801-2013 updates and refines the Unified Power Format for low-power VLSI design, reflecting changes in power modeling and verification.

VHDL is a hardware description language with rich constructs that can model complex systems. It can also be constrained for use as the starting point of an FPGA or ASIC design.

It may be necessary to move to three-dimensional 'FinFET' transistors for future process nodes, but what impact will this have on circuit design?

Fully depleted silicon on insulator (FD-SOI) transistor architectures may offer speed and power advantages, at the cost of a shift to non-standard substrates.

The IEEE Unified Power Format (UPF) standard is intended to support low-power designs that use switchable power states and power islands.