Are Standard Cell Libs, Memories and Mixed-signal IP Available at 7nm FF?

By SemiWiki

May 6, 2016

More than 500 designers (562) have responded to a survey made in 2015 by Synopsys. Answering to the question “What is the fastest clock speed of your design?” 56% have mentioned a clock higher than 500 MHz (and still 40% higher than 1 GHz). If you compare with the results obtained 10 years ago, the largest proportion of answers was for clock ranging between 100 MHz to 300 MHz.

That means that Moore’s law has been extremely effective during the last ten years, and also that for a high proportion of designs, speed improvement is a real need. These designs are the natural candidates to target FinFET technologies. From the graph below, you see that moving from 28nm (bulk) to 14nm FF can provide 45% faster frequency, at constant dynamic & leakage power, each step below, 10nm and 7nm, providing another 20% improvement.

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