Semiconductor Engineering .:. Darker Silicon

As most readers already know, however, there was a limit. Smaller devices with thinner dielectrics and shorter channels are more prone to leakage. Indeed, leakage, negligible for much of the industry’s history and ignored in Dennard’s original paper (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org /xpl/articleDetails.jsp?reload=true&arnumber=4785543), now approaches the same order of magnitude as the circuit’s dynamic power. Advances such as the introduction of high dielectric constant gate dielectric materials helped, but leakage-limited transistor structures are now a fact of life. Switching a transistor at a lower threshold voltage requires a JANUARY 29TH, 2015 BY: KATHERINE DERBYSHIRE (HTTP://SEMIENGINEERING.COM/AUTHOR/KATHERINE/) Search