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

To: milo_morai who wrote (98377)	3/14/2000 1:29:00 AM
From: THE WATSONYOUTH	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572711

Re: "TWY, what is you take on Dresden gates being 100nm in length. Is this a .15/.18um chip?" There is no easy way to absolutely define the chip. For instance, the 750MHz part I saw from Austin was built in .18um groundrules and appeared to have devices from a .18um Moto process. The physical poly was 1200A and the gate oxide was 28A. Given a minimum 12% guardband and some margin beyond, this part must have had a raw Fmax of at least 870MHz at 1.7V. Now the question is: was AMD able to squeeze out 1GHz with this same process simply by shrinking to the minimum poly the device design will support. In other words, will the device design allow a shrink to 1000A with still acceptable device parameters (Vt, Ioff, etc.)I would expect a 200A device shrink to improve Fmax by at least 26% and the increase to 1.8V to increase performance another 6%. So, the 870MHz goes to at least 1148 MHz which is enough for a 1 GHz part with guardband. If the answer is yes, then they achieve 1GHz in Austin at 28A gate oxide and 1000A minimum physical poly at 1.8V. I would expect the Dresden process to have a nominal physical poly of 200A smaller (1000A) with the minimum device design good to maybe 800A. The gate oxide would be thinned to say 23A. At 23A, AMD can still run at 1.8V as long as they can deal with the power dissipation above 1GHz. If this is the scenario, you will see MUCH faster parts out of Dresden although the groundrules would still be called .18um. You must realize, this is all SPECULATION on my part. But, it would explain the much faster parts Charles claims are coming out of Dresden. THE WATSONYOUTH