( ESNUG 513 Item 8 ) -------------------------------------------- [11/01/12]
From: John Cooley <jcooley=user domain=zeroskew.com>
Subject: Holy CRAP! IBM taped out 3 ARM chips in 14 nm using Cadence tools
At the end-of-day yesterday, Cadence put out a press release touting that
the engineers at IBM had just taped out a chip in IBM FinFET 14 nm with an
ARM Cortex-M0 processor, some SRAMs, and a mess of ARM/Artisan logic, using
Cadence Encounter Digital and Virtuoso.
This is big news because it's the first public non-Intel 14 nm chip.
  
It was announced at the ARM TechCon 2012 conference that's still going on
this week at the Santa Clara convention center.
I called around and found out that it was really 3 test chips that the IBM
research guys did to characterize their 14 nm FinFET technology. They were
trying to find the tweaks and corner cases that their SOI 14 nm needed.
 
Although its called "14 nm", the IBM process is like the GlobalFoundries
process where the FinFETs are 14 nm but the metal pitch is still "20 nm".
(And because of Common Platform don't be surprised if Samsung's "14 nm"
works the exact same way, too.) Anyway, this hybrid approach pretty much
means "14 nm" will be faster, less leakage, less power; but overall area
will NOT go down as one goes from 20 nm to "14 nm".
I was told by an engineer who saw the presentation that IBM laid down a
simple grid of 14 nm FinFETs and then routed 20 nm metal between to make
up the chips' std cells.
Anyway the IBM research guys spun off 3 different routing styles to see how
it would impact power, yield, timing, costs, etc.
They also gave the Cadence tools a good workout in 14 nm, too. For example
all the std cells were made in Virtuoso. Then Encounter Digital was used
to layout the entire design using all sorts whizbang FinFET 14 nm special
stuff like double patterning, etc. plus built-in Cadence QRC Extraction.
And Cadence ETS was used by itself for all intermediate timing plus for the
final chip sign-off.
  
That last part of Cadence-ETS-only was quite interesting given the decade+
stranglehold Synopsys PrimeTime has had in all things timing. I wonder what
Aart's thinking. "Did anyone else sense a tremor in the Force today?" :)
- John Cooley
DeepChip.com Holliston, MA
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