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It is may be because of the limitation of atom size. A transistor can not be built less than the size of the atom and atomic size are in Angstrom. Further, Nano technology has still got a huge scope for improvement and research.
I have never built an IC (I simply select one then buy it) but I would think that the size of a transistor in an IC is affected by how much heat it must dissipate.
Audioguru, But don't you think that as the transistor sizes are shrinking the Voltage and current requirements are reducing and thus the power dissipation is also reducing for each transistor?
I am an analog guy. Many analog transistors are used in linear amplifiers with pretty high voltages and currents. So they get hot and must have pretty big chips to dissipate the heat.
I think you are talking about flea-power digital logic circuits that switch high and low with very low voltage and current.
I am an analog guy. Many analog transistors are used in linear amplifiers with pretty high voltages and currents. So they get hot and must have pretty big chips to dissipate the heat.
I think you are talking about flea-power digital logic circuits that switch high and low with very low voltage and current.
That reminds me of a design I had to fix that exhibited problems in an analog switch, after the vendor did a die shrink on the device.
Old device on a original process node didn't have a problem with the voltage spikes in the select input that were being sent to the device that exceeded the supply rails.
New device with different lot codes (no other indication of changes to the device, i.e. part numbers were the same) would fail after a number of hours of operation.
Turns out the smaller die wasn't able to handle the over voltage spikes in the select control and would end up failing, as we couldn't fix the cause of the overshoot we ended up adding a diode on the input connected to the supply rail to limit the amount of overshoot.
So moral of the story, not all die shrinks are a good thing ;-)
Well, i recently went through Jan M. Rabaey and N.H Weste book. I found useful info about the VLSI technology there and also these books throw some light on the future of the VLSI Technology. I think that these books could answer your question with much more facts and detail.
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