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

To: Cirruslvr who wrote (68177)	8/9/1999 11:47:00 PM
From: grok	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1578852

RE: <Athlon voltage info? Someone posted at a different thread that according to this - amd.com on page 10, the Vcc for the processor runs at 1.6v. So who is correct in what they think the voltage the Athlon runs at?> That document leaves no ambiguity: processor voltage is 1.6V! That is quite a surprise for an 0.25u process. But I guess that K7 is just following in the footsteps of Alpha which had a lower than normal voltage too. Maybe Process Boy and other technology people can correct me if I'm wrong here. I think that this means that they are using transistors which are well advanced from a typical 0.25u process -- especially oxide thickness which is probably as thin as most 0.18u processes. Since the oxide is thin the voltage must be reduced accordingly to avoid breakdown. Since the voltage is reduced then they can reduce Leff also at least as much as their lithography allows. Net result of all this is faster chip at lower power. Many chips go through this sequence: 1. Get designed and introduced at x micro design rules and transistors 2. Get a "gate shrink" boost by having transistors shrunk. 3. Get a full shrink by moving to y micron process. It looks like AMD skipped step 1. and went right to step 2. However, I think that this also means that there will be a lot less than the expected performance boost when they go to 0.18u process. This is because the transistors are already half way there and when the full 0.18u shrink occurs the transistor widths will shrink a lot more than the lengths and Tox do. Comments?????????