A long but interesting interview with LSI Logic's Chairman/CEO
sumnet.com
LSI Logic Single-Chip Just 0.18-Micron Away
Excerpt:
LSI Logic has already started designs at 0.18-micron and is set to begin the next generations of development very soon and possibly at the company's Gresham, Ore., fab--slated to go on-line early next year. Mr. Corrigan does not see any significant barriers in moving to 0.18, outside of those everyone already knows. Moving below 0.18-micron devices is where a significant challenge lies.
"It is just more expensive equipment; it just takes you a little longer to develop the process. But there aren't any major barriers there," he said. "I think as you get down to 0.15 and 0.14, then it might get a little tough. There's always a price at which you can do things; it just needs more money. But I don't see any real barriers for the next couple of generations."
Some of the driving forces behind this move to 0.18-micron is in the integration of these multiple components to make systems run faster and reduce power and memory.
"The only way you do that is by shrinking the size. But when you're dealing with several million transistors on a chip, the actual time it takes to design those several million transistors takes quite a long time," Mr. Corrigan said.
"So a fairly complex computer still takes two years or more before it actually goes to production. Computer guys still tend to drive technology; they want to see the most advanced technology first," he said. "So well before the computer guy has actually gone to production, even though he started on something that was very advanced, we are already on to the next generation."
The consumer world poses different challenges, says Mr. Corrigan, as speed is not usually an issue and the actual size of the chips is the main driving force.
"So we tend to be in volume production with the more advanced technology earlier in consumer, even though we start designing later, because we can control that ourselves; so that if there's a consumer product that we might have designed four years ago, it quite likely will still be in production today, but we'll have moved it through two or three generations of technology," he added. "But we can do that. Typically, we can't do that with a computer. So we're seeing the consumer business as a real volume driver of the newer technology, because you can move to much higher levels of integration." |
