SoC DESIGN

Motivation for SoC Design Review of Moores Law

Outline
History of Transistors and circuits The Integrated circuit manufacturing process Moore Law is announced Benefits of ICs Extrapolating Moores Law to its conclusion Technological advances Moores Law version 2?

Discrete Transistors and Circuits

The transistor succeeded the valve in the late 1940s
Electronic engineers began to design complex circuits using discrete components transistors, resistors, capacitors Performance and other problems were noticed due to the number of separate components Circuits were unreliable and heavy High power consumption long time to assemble Expensive to produce

The Solution Integrated Circuits

Build entire circuit on a wafer of silicon
Use masking and spraying techniques in manufacture Pure silicon wafers made from large crystals of silicon Areas of silicon doped with suitable elements e.g. Be Conductive tracks made from aluminium Use this technique to produce other components e.g. capacitors and resistors on the same wafer

Problems solved
Inter-device distances reduced faster circuits
Lightweight circuits suitable for space travel Cheaper assembly cost after recovery of R&D costs

Identical circuit properties better matching

Less power required less heat dissipated Smaller circuits smaller devices could be built

INTRODUCTION

Birth of Moores Law

The 19 April 1965 issue of Electronics magazine, marking the McGraw-Hill publication's 35th anniversary, It contained an article with the title "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits." Its author, Gordon E. Moore, director, Research and Development Laboratories, Fairchild Semiconductor, had been asked to predict what would happen over the next 10 years in the semiconductor components industry. His article speculated that by 1975 it would be possible to cram as many as 65 000 components onto a single silicon chip about 6 millimetres square.

Gordon Moore - Observations

Gordon Moore worked for Fairchild Semiconductors He noticed a trend in IC manufacture

Every 2 years the number of components on an area of silicon doubled*

He published this work in 1965 known as Moores Law

His predictions were for 10 years into the future

His work predicted personal computers and fast telecommunication networks
* Sources vary regarding time period

Moore's Law
Defined by Dr. Gordon Moore during the sixties. Predicts an exponential increase in component density over time, with a doubling time of 18 months. Applicable to microprocessors, DRAMs , DSPs and other microelectronics. Monotonic increase in density observed since the 1960s.

COST AND CURVES

# Components / Integrated function

Moore's Law and Performance

The performance of computers is determined by architecture and clock speed. Clock speed doubles over a 3 year period due to the scaling laws on chip. Processors using identical or similar architectures gain performance directly as a function of Moore's Law. Improvements in internal architecture can yield better gains than predicted by Moore's Law.

Moores Law - Density

Moores Law - Clock Speed

Moores Law (Technologists)

Parameters
16 transistor/chip circa 1964 59% growth/year 36 years (2000) and counting

1st years 16 ??? 3rd years 64 ??? 15th years 16,000 ??? 24th years 100,000 ??? 36th years 300,000,000 ??? Was useful & then got more than 1,000,000 times better!

Moores Law Data (Technologists)

Other Moores Laws

Other technologies improving rapidly
Magnetic disk capacity DRAM capacity Fiber-optic network bandwidth

Other aspects improving slowly

Delay to memory Delay to disk Delay across networks

Computer Implementors Challenge

Design with dissimilarly expanding resources To Double computer performance every two years A.k.a., (Popular) Moores Law

Cost Side of Moores Law

About every two years: same computing at half cost Long-term effect: 1940s Prototypes for calculating ballistic trajectories 1950s Early mainframes for large banks 1960s Mainframes flourish in many large businesses 1970s Minicomputers for business, science, & engineering Early 1980s PCs for word processing & spreadsheets Late 1980s PCs for desktop publishing 1990s PCs for games, multimedia, e-mail, & web

Jim Gray: In ten years you can buy a computer for the cost of its sales tax today (assuming 3% or more)

Graph of Moores Law

Example

Market

IC Technologies
Small Scale Integration (SSI) combined around 10 discrete components onto 5mm square of silicon substrate. SSI led to Medium Scale Integration (MSI), then Large Scale Integration (LSI) with many thousands of components in the same area of silicon. Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) provided the means to implement around 1 million components per chip. Current technology produces silicon wafers with around 50 million components per chip. The Pentium 4 has around 55 million components on the wafer (2003).

IC Technology

The Next Step

INTEL have announced that they have the technology to produce microprocessors containing more than 400 million transistors, running at 10 gigahertz and operating at less than one volt, in the next five to ten years.
This is in line with Moores law

Shrinking the Size of a Component

How small can a component become?

What limits the size of a device?

What do we make the devices from? Do quantum effects have an influence here? If there is a limit, what happens to Moores Law?

The Current Limitations

Circuits cannot be reduced beyond atomic size
Quantum effects reduce the reliability as size decreases Lithographic techniques become more complex as the size of

components becomes smaller than the wavelength of light

Speed of electrical signals is finite This suggests that Moores Law will finally end

Why does the law exist?

Some of the factors that contribute to Moores Law:

Manufacturers wishing to keep up with the law

Competition between manufacturers Successive technologies providing better design tools Customer demand for better products Mans constant struggle to advance knowledge There may be other factors too

Future of Moores Law

Short-Term (1-5 years) Will operate (due to prototypes in lab) Fabrication cost will go up rapidly Medium-Term (5-15 years) Exponential growth rate will likely slow Trillion-dollar industry is motivated Long-Term (>15 years) May need new technology (chemical or quantum) We can do better (e.g., human brain) I would not close the patent office

Future of Harnessing Moores Law

Thread-Level Parallelism
Multiple processors cooperating (exists today) More common in future with multiple processors per chip Parallelism in Internet? The Grid.

System on a Chip
Processor, memory, and I/O on one chip Cost-performance leap like microprocessor? (e.g., accelerometer at right)

Communication
World-wide web & wireless cell phone fuse!
Other properties: robust & easy to design & use

Lateral Thinking
To improve the performance of devices, new technologies are in development: Quantum storage (quantum data registers - a faster, more efficient way to store and retrieve data than the binary system we use today)
Light operated transistors Electro-optical polymers and more are showing new techniques for achieving the ever higher performance demanded by industry and consumers

The Future of ICs

Moore acknowledged that his "law" won't hold forever. He asserted that the right technological approaches can delay "forever", extending the longevity of his original prediction. Intel are working on new ideas such as SiGe and strained silicon to delay the end of Moores Law
Designing transistors that switch at speeds around THz (can switch on and off a trillion times per second) The advances continue!

The End of the Line?

It is obvious that technology will improve

We may meet the lower size limit of a transistor

Therefore the abilities of the transistor itself will have to improve instead Faster switching, lower power designs etc. ICs still improve

Moores Law version 2?

After his law is no longer valid what can we use to measure trends? Component density? No it would be fairly constant Performance? Yes but which metric? Switching rate? Individual or bulk? Rise time? Access time or read/ write time Other measurable attributes

Moore version 2s metric(s)

Technological advances will continue as long as there is demand for digital devices

It is immaterial whether the component density limit is reached

Another metric will have to be chosen to allow the IC evolution to be mapped and to allow valid predictions to be made Which metric this is extremely complex to choose

Conclusion
Moores law will eventually reach its inevitable conclusion Technology will continue to advance ICs with improved properties will be manufactured Another metric will need to be chosen to allow the future trends to be mapped and predicted The complexity of current IC design means this choice will be difficult