SoCs in New Context Look beyond PPA

By SemiWiki

March 23, 2015

If we look back in the last century, performance and area were two main criteria for semiconductor chip design. All design tools and flows were concentrated towards optimizing those two aspects. As a result, density of chips started increasing and power became a critical factor. Now, Power, Performance and Area (PPA) are looked together as the prime criteria for SoCs. Since the beginning of this century the semiconductor industry (including technology, design and software) worked tremendously to optimize PPA for semiconductor chips; the latest technologies being FinFET and FD-SOI.

Today, we have started seeing temperature as a key criterion for consideration in the semiconductor design. Like PPA, temperature acts as a basic criterion at the device and chip levels. We are seeing state-of-the-art tools in the market for thermal analysis of chips and packages. Temperature is a key criterion for hand-held mobile, automotive, and storage devices and therefore for SoCs in that space.

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