Modern microprocessors face a serious challenge. Their recent development cycles have not seen clock rate improvement, and their designs have relied upon so called multiple cores to produce enhanced performance. With a few exceptions, there has been little improvement in run time for many common applications, perhaps for as long as a decade testifying the failure of Moore's Law, on which the progress of computing industry is based. Due to its seemingly extreme speed, the present project explores a device, which may have the potential for breakthroughs in future multiple core computation at reasonable power levels. One of the important outreach goals of the research is to alert the integrated circuit design community (including students) of what is possible using these novel devices. The proposed research is focused on trying to make it easy for such designers to investigate this approach on their own, thus potentially resulting in extensive societal impact.
The technical goal of this proposal is to investigate the use of lateral Silicon Germanium (SiGe) Heterojunction Bipolar Transistor (HBT) fabricated in a Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) process. The impetus for this work comes from preliminary research demonstarting that these structures can drive capacitive loads (IC interconnect) at speeds exceeding 1 THz and with lower power than current and future FIN-FET CMOS devices. Specifically, the project will develop CAD tools for the lateral/SOI variety of high-speed SiGe heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBT).
