Development of an Embedded Process Detector Circuit Targeting Advanced CMOS Semiconductor Technologies

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Moortec Semiconductor Ltd develop on-chip monitoring circuits and intellectual property (IP) for silicon chip devices manufactured on advanced technologies used in today’s electronics products. Moortec plan to develop a prototype embedded process detector circuit, otherwise known as a process monitor, that will measure the variability of circuits manufactured on advanced CMOS technology nodes such as 28 nano-meter (nm), 16nm and 14nm. With advances in silicon CMOS technology and the scaling of transistor channel lengths to nanometer dimensions, process induced variations in circuit delays have begun to significantly impact chip performance and power consumption. Moortec’s Process Detector (PD) will possess features and address applications that go beyond what is currently commercially available to the designers and developers of semiconductor devices. The PD will allow a silicon chip to self-determine its own manufactured process characteristics, providing information to the rest of the system as to how its performance can be optimised. The System on Chip (SoC) can then be optimised for either its power consumption or its speed for computations or data transfer. The PD will also allow for the ageing effects, which all silicon devices are subjected to, to be measured and monitored by the system, potentially throughout the lifetime of the device.