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The support behind more advanced mobile phones

The support behind more advanced mobile phones

BY Evelyn 11 Nov,2020 Mobile Phones iPhone

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Today, people's lives are inseparable from smart phones. The iphone XS mobile phone released last year can be configured with a maximum capacity of 512GB, while 10 years ago, 8GB was already the top configuration of mobile phone storage. In just ten years, the tens-times increase in mobile phone storage is the result of the rapid development of integrated circuits. In addition, the acceleration of mobile phone operation speed, the reduction of computer size, the increase of storage capacity and main frequency are all closely related to the development of integrated circuits.

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The smallest functional unit of an integrated circuit is a transistor, which can achieve different functions with some passive components (such as resistors). One of the important indicators for measuring integrated circuits is the degree of integration - the number of transistors per unit of area that can be accommodated on a chip.

Moore's Law says that the number of transistors in integrated circuits doubles every two years. This law accurately predicted the rapid development of the semiconductor industry. Under the guidance of Moore’s Law, the manufacturing process of silicon-based integrated circuits has been steadily evolving in the past half century. The semiconductor industry went through the IC (Integrated Circuit) era in the 1960s and the ultra-large integrated circuits (VLSI) era in the 1980s, developed into the current era of Gb and Tb. For a long period of time in the future, silicon-based integrated circuits will still be the mainstream of semiconductor technology.

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In the past two decades, the technology nodes of transistors have been shrinking: 130 nm, 90 nm, 65 nm, 45 nm, 32 nm, 22 nm, 14 nm, 7 nm (the most advanced technology at the moment), 5/3 nm is in the process of development.  With the shrinking of technology nodes, the integration of silicon-based chips has become higher and higher (that is, the number of transistors per unit area has increased), followed by larger storage capacity and faster calculation speed. However, one point that cannot be ignored is that the power consumption caused by high integration will affect the reliability of the chip and the performance of the transistor. As a result, the main goal of the integrated circuit industry has changed from initially improving performance and integration to reducing power consumption.

The most effective way to reduce transistor power consumption is to reduce the operating voltage (VDD) and increase the switching rate of the transistor. The limit values of VDD and SS of the traditional silicon-based complementary metal oxide semiconductor integrated circuits (14/10 nm technology node) currently used are 0.64V and 60mV/DEC (millivolts/magnitude voltage and switching conversion rate have reached the limit). Among the new microelectronic devices that can meet the small operating piezoelectric and low sub-threshold swing are tunneling field effect transistors, impact ionization field effect transistors and negative capacitance field effect transistors. But these transistors have significant defects, such as low speed and poor stability.

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