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Product category: Analogue and Mixed Signal ICs
News Release from: Texas Instruments (April 2001-March 2006) | Subject: Next-generation 90nm process
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 27 January 2003

Next-generation 90nm process accelerates SoCs

Texas Instruments has delivered the first fully functional wireless digital baseband device from its next-generation 90nm process

The transition to 90nm offers many benefits to TI customers moving their designs to TI's most advanced manufacturing technology. By shrinking the dimension of the transistors' power consumption, size and manufacturing costs are reduced relative to the previous manufacturing process. Distances between transistors are also reduced, increasing overall processor performance and allowing integration of many more features on an equivalent size chip.

TI is one of the first semiconductor companies to deliver working 90nm products.

'With the delivery of working 90nm products, TI has again demonstrated the benefit customers derive by working with a semiconductor company that owns its own technology roadmap and manufacturing', said Dr Hans Stork, Senior Vice President and Director of TI's silicon technology development.

'Our R and D investment has led to the development of a set of very advanced CMOS processes that deliver the integration and circuit optimisation required to match device architectures with the targeted application area'.

TI's 90nm process features transistors as small as 37nm, a width 2000 times smaller than the thickness of newsprint.

With the ability to pack over 400 million transistors on a single chip, TI's technology is driving cost-effective SoC solutions with unprecedented levels of performance and power savings for TI products.

With up to nine layers of copper metal, TI's 90nm process also supports integration of a wide array of analogue and RF components for SoC development.

Integration of analogue and RF components for communication transmit and receive functions, and for analogue-to-digital and digital-to-analogue conversion circuits, is critical to a wide range of signal processing applications.

TI continues to offer extremely competitive embedded SRAM in the 90nm process, with densities up to 800Kbit/mm2.

In 2005 TI plans to also deliver its 90nm embedded FRAM technology; a low cost, high density, low-power nonvolatile memory alternative.

Previous process generations typically utilised a single pair of CMOS transistors optimised to support all the circuit functions on a chip.

However, TI's 90nm process makes it possible to use a collection of transistors that are 'tuned' for different functions on a single chip to meet a variety of performance, density and power consumption requirements.

This is done through adjustments to the transistors' gate length, threshold voltage, gate oxide thickness or bias conditions.

The result is that transistors with the highest performance can be used in performance critical functions such as signal processing, whereas transistors with lower power consumption can be used to support functions with lower active performance requirements to minimise system power.

TI expects this capability to reduce system power by two to three times in future products while simultaneously increasing performance.

TI will offer several optimised 90nm process flows to meet the unique needs of a variety of end products and applications.

The company's first 90nm product was produced using the GS50 library that will allow for lower power operation, longer battery life and less heat generation.

This process is optimised for devices such as 2.5 or 3G wireless phones, PDAs, digital cameras and Internet audio players.

In addition to GS50, TI's high performance ASIC and DSP products will run on SR50, a process flow that combines a balance of performance and power consumption.

The third flow will be a high-performance computing products flow that Sun Microsystems will target for next generation UltraSPARC processor-based workstations and servers.

Given the smaller geometries, the optimised transistors and metal interconnect system, TI estimates that UltraSPARC processor performance will double over today's solutions.

Devices will also achieve considerable power savings by migrating to 90nm technology, enabling higher density system designs for Sun products.

TI's 90nm process integrates a low-k dielectric, organo-silicate glass (OSG) that has a k-value (relative permittivity) of 2.8.

TI has extended its history as an innovator in gate dielectric materials, as this process is the third generation of TI's technology to use a plasma nitrided oxide (PNO) for the core transistors, which will be scaled to 1.2nm for the first time.

PNO maintains the transistors' high level of reliability, minimises gate leakage and allows TI's 90nm technology to meet its performance benchmarks.

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