10 years of transistor innovations in System-on-Chip (SoC) era

In the last decade, System-on-Chip (SoC) products, including smart phones, tablets, netbooks, embedded systems, wireless communications, and ASIC products, have emerged as the rising stars in the mobile and embedded IC markets. Concurrently, the main stream silicon process technology has undergone radical overhauls since the old dimensional scaling is running out of steam. Innovative transistor architectures based upon new materials and structures, such as strained silicon at 90 nm, high-k/metal gate at 45 nm, and recently 3-D Tri-Gate at 22 nm, have been developed and ramped into high volume manufacturing to continue Moore´s Law scaling. This paper examines how these advanced transistor architectures can be exploited to meet and exceed the technical requirements of new SoC products.