Intel 45 nm details notable by their absence ...
Intel Demonstrates Working 45 nm Chips
Peter Singer, Editor-in-Chief -- Semiconductor International, 4/1/2006
Intel has produced the industry's first fully functional SRAM chips using 45 nm process technology. The goal is to begin manufacturing chips with this technology in 2007 using 300 mm wafers. Intel currently has two manufacturing facilities making 65 nm chips in Arizona and Oregon, and two more will be coming online this year in Ireland and Oregon.
Compared with 65 nm chips, a move to 45 nm offers about a twofold improvement in transistor density, which can be used to reduce chip size or increase transistor count. 45 nm also offers >20% improvement in transistor switching speed or a more than fivefold reduction in transistor current leakage. This will benefit battery life for mobile devices.
Although few technical details were released, Intel said an SRAM test vehicle was produced and included all transistor and interconnect features to be used on 45 nm microprocessors. Such test vehicles are used to demonstrate technology performance, yield and reliability prior to microprocessor product ramp. Intel Senior Fellow Mark Bohr, who briefed reporters on the milestone, said Intel typically does its logic chip a year and a half after the test vehicle SRAM chip, which would indicate a mid-2007 timeframe for production.
Each individual 153 Mb SRAM chip contains more than a billion transistors. That is 200× the number of transistors on the Intel Pentium processor with MMX technology, which was launched ~10 years ago on Intel's 0.35 µm process technology.
The memory cell size of the new SRAM chips (0.346 µm2) is almost half the size of a 65 nm cell.
A six-transistor SRAM cell, which is part of the SRAM test chip used to demonstrate 45 nm functionality.
Surprisingly, Intel elected to not present details of its 45 nm technology at the International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) in December, where such milestone announcements are often made. Instead, 65 nm technology using strained silicon was presented in a late paper. It is not likely that 45 nm technology will be radically different from 65 nm, although Bohr said that the 45 nm chip required the company to do "innovative things on transistors and interconnects." The company was not yet ready to discuss the details of those publicly, he said, but the fact that the test vehicle SRAM chip has been demonstrated means the process technologies have more or less been locked down, including the layout design rules, interconnect materials and most, if not all, of the manufacturing tools, according to Bohr (as earlier reported by Electronic News).
The transistors are still planar, and Intel is not using finFETs or trigates in this generation, although the company is continuing the use of strained silicon at 45 nm. The process used 193 nm dry lithography to pattern critical layers, Intel said.
Intel plans to start fabricating devices with 45 nm technology on 300 mm wafers starting in 2007. A wafer with SRAM test chips is shown.
The 45 nm process is under development at Intel's D1D fab in Oregon. In addition, the company has announced that two high-volume fabs are under construction to manufacture chips using the 45 nm process — Fab 32 in Arizona and Fab 28 in Israel.
Commenting on the need for higher-density, faster chips, Bohr noted that people today demand more functionality in their lives. "Just think back to what computers were able to do 20 years ago and compare that to what they can do today. You can watch streaming video or movies on a computer, you can store a tremendous amount of information, you can do calculations at tremendous speed. Computing is becoming much more ubiquitous in our lives. Now people want these capabilities not on their desktop...they want it in their hand. That portability factor and the low-power factor are also things that the consumers really desire very much.
"Intel used to develop process technologies focused primarily on desktop microprocessors, but over the years we began to expand the markets and the applications for our silicon process technology to server products, to mobile products and now even into the handheld space. There's just a wide range of processor chips that will be built up on this 45 nm technology that range anywhere from small handheld devices — cell phones and PDAs — all the way up to large mainframe server computers and everything in between."
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