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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: kapkan4u who wrote (62492)	6/20/1999 8:26:00 AM
From: kapkan4u	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574267

Process experts. Is it possible that Intel encountered "leakage and standby currents" problems in the 0.18u process, resulting in CuMine delay? Kap. From eetimes.com At the current pace, CMOS transistors are set to top out at 1-V supply voltages. At that point, Davari said, the minimum effective (Leff) channel length of a transistor will shrink to 0.03 micron, which corresponds to a nominal channel length of 0.04 micron. At that point, leakage and standby currents will become unbearable. As chip designers reduce Vdd, they must also drop the Vt of the transistors for faster switching speeds. But for every 100-millivolt reduction in the Vt, leakage and standby current jump by a factor of 10, Davari said. If leakage and standby current get too high, they cause problems with burn-in, Iddq testing and functional dynamic circuits while raising the power dissipation at worst-case operating temperature, he said. The problem is starting to crop up with 1.5-V devices. "As we get close to the 1-V [supply voltage] regime, the threshold voltage reductions are nowhere near the reduction of the supply voltage," said Davari. "Right now we've just reached the threshold of this deviation, and as we project into the future it gets more serious."

To: kapkan4u who wrote (62492)	6/20/1999 9:58:00 AM
From: Scumbria	Respond to of 1574267

Kap, I believe that Dirk Meyer said just the opposite in his presentation. Namely that no synthesis tools were used and the placement was done by hand. I can confirm that Dirk said very little synthesis was used, and that placement was done by hand. Routing was done automatically. how can you tell that the core was synthesized just by looking at the sample? It is actually very easy to distinguish between a place & route block, and a hand placed block. P&R produces very random looking patterns on the die, whereas hand placed blocks appear quite regular. Scumbria