When the days were old and the knights were bold and IP was invented, you'd wrap an insulator around your gate and leakage was prevented. As the insulator became thinner with process shrinkages, though, leakage became a problem. It's so bad, engineers are now having nightmares about their future 45- and 32-nm designs.
"Subthreshold and gate leakage have become a large problems in deep-submicron technologies," says Dan Hillman, vice president of engineering at Mosaid Technologies.
Intel, IBM, and Sematech have delivered disparate solutions for the first fundamental change in transistors in nearly 40 years (see "Transistor Recovers From Midlife Crisis With Fundamental Material Change,"). But what if you can't afford to partner with IBM? Consider Mosaid's Mobilize low-power IP platform.
"Mobilize virtually eliminates leakage, enabling low-power design in 90 nm and 65 nm without changing the silicon process," says Hillman.
The platform addresses leakage by providing static and active power management in a configurable standard-cell library that's used to form voltage- and frequency-scalable power islands (see the figure).
An automated hardware- or software-controlled power island manager (PIM) administers all power island sequencing of active and sleep phases over process, voltage, and temperature. This eases the instantiation of power islands while reducing leakage over 100-fold. It also can be used in conjunction with 1- and 0.8-V supplies. And, it can transition to and from sleep mode in a mere 50 ns.
There will be no speed impact using the Mobilize platform, and the overhead will require an area increase of less than 2%. Since the technology is built using standard manufacturing processes, no architectural changes to existing designs are required.
Available now, Mobilize is based on standard cells. It works seamlessly in conjunction with EDA tools from Cadence, Magma, and Synopsys.
Mosaid Technologies
www.mosaid.com