Limits on Fundamental Limits to Computation

An indispensable part of our lives, computing has also become essential to industries and governments. Steady improvements in computer hardware have been supported by periodic doubling of transistor densities in integrated circuits over the last fifty years. Such Moore scaling now requires increasingly heroic efforts, stimulating research in alternative hardware and stirring controversy. To help evaluate emerging technologies and enrich our understanding of integrated-circuit scaling, we review fundamental limits to computation: in manufacturing, energy, physical space, design and verification effort, and algorithms. To outline what is achievable in principle and in practice, we recall how some limits were circumvented, compare loose and tight limits. We also point out that engineering difficulties encountered by emerging technologies may indicate yet-unknown limits.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, 1 tabl

Addressing Manufacturing Challenges in NoC-based ULSI Designs

Hernández Luz, C. (2012). Addressing Manufacturing Challenges in NoC-based ULSI Designs [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/1669

Design and Implementation of Area and Power Efficient Low Power VLSI Circuits through Simple Byte Compression with Encoding Technique

Transition activity is one of the major factors for power dissipation in Low power VLSI circuits due to charging and discharging of internal node capacitances. Power dissipation is reduced through minimizing the transition activity by using proper coding techniques. In this paper Multi coding technique is implemented to reduce the transition activity up to 58.26%. Speed of data transmission basically depends on the number of bits transmitted through bus. When handling data for large applications huge storage space is required for processing, storing and transferring information. Data compression is an algorithm to reduce the number of bits required to represent information in a compact form. Here simple byte compression technique is implemented to achieve a lossless data compression. This compression algorithm also reduces the encoder computational complexity when handling huge bits of information. Simple byte compression technique improves the compression ratio up to 62.5%. As a cumulative effort of Simple byte compression with Multi coding techniques minimize area and power dissipation in low power VLSI circuits

Low pressure chemical vapor deposition of copper films from CU(I)(HFAC)(TMVS)

Recently, copper has been found as a possible substitute for Al alloys because of its low resistivity (1.67 μΩ • cm) and potentially improved resistance to electromigration. Conventional physical vapor deposition (PVD) method do not provide the conformal deposition profile for the high density integrated circuit, therefore, chemical vapor deposition (CVD) has become the most promising method for the resulting conformal profile. In this work, a cold wall, single wafer, CVD tungsten reactor was used for the deposition of copper with Cu(I)(hfac)(tmvs). Film growth rates were between 100 to 800 A/min depending on processing conditions, and an Arrhenius type activation energy of 16.1 kcal/mole was obtained in the temperature region of 150-180 °C. No significant amount of contamination is detected in the copper films, and the resistivity of the films was routinely near 2.2 μΩ • cm when the film was 5000 A or more. The surface roughness of the films increased with increasing film thickness, and the crystal orientation was found as a function of growth rate. These obtained results demonstrated the feasibility of using Cu(I)(hfac)(tmvs) in the synthesis of high purity copper films using liquid injection by LPCVD

A thermal simulation process based on electrical modeling for complex interconnect, packaging, and 3DI structures

To reduce the product development time and achieve first-pass silicon success, fast and accurate estimation of very-large-scale integration (VLSI) interconnect, packaging and 3DI (3D integrated circuits) thermal profiles has become important. Present commercial thermal analysis tools are incapable of handling very complex structures and have integration difficulties with existing design flows. Many analytical thermal models, which could provide fast estimates, are either too specific or oversimplified. This paper highlights a methodology, which exploits electrical resistance solvers for thermal simulation, to allow acquisition of thermal profiles of complex structures with good accuracy and reasonable computation cost. Moreover, a novel accurate closed-form thermal model is developed. The model allows an isotropic or anisotropic equivalent medium to replace the noncritical back-end-of-line (BEOL) regions so that the simulation complexity is dramatically reduced. Using these techniques, this paper introduces the thermal modeling of practical complex VLSI structures to facilitate thermal guideline generation. It also demonstrates the benefits of the proposed anisotropic equivalent medium approximation for real VLSI structures in terms of the accuracy and computational cost. © 2006 IEEE.published_or_final_versio