Here we are going to take a look at current technologies’ strengths and weaknesses in relation to the past.
Increasing Active Elements
For perspective, there has been a monumental increase in the number of active elements available in an integrated circuit compared to decades ago. This has allowed an increase in device complexity and speed.
Because of this complexity, there has been a necessary increase in the complexity of testing and test tools. Modern chips have many redundant operating sections and a JTAG ( test bus ). This allows all sections on a chip to be 100% functional tested. Sections found to be bad are mapped out. This has become necessary because, at current densities, not all of the elements on a newly manufactured IC are functional. Failed functional units are mapped out using methods such as read-only-memory elements or other means. Without this practice, the cost of a working chip would be too high. Above a certain threshold of failed sections, the chip is simply discarded. This practice started as densities rose in memory chips. There were always failed banks of memory elements, so building redundant elements and mapping them in or out made sense. Otherwise the chip yield would be too low. Chips with mapped out sections could be sold as lower density chips, assuring some revenue, especially at the time a product was new and yields were low.
Increasing Pin Count
An increase in complexity also means an increase in die size and the number of pins to a single IC package. When I started in this business, 40 pins was the largest number. The largest number these days is the 3647 FCLGA package. That indeed is 3,647 pins !
Decreasing Repairability
Inevitably, this pin count increase means that replacement of a single XSI (extreme scale integration) chip is nearly impossible, and certainly not feasible. As far as chip lifetime or reliability, this is unknown, other than the MTBF claimed in the datasheet. Electromigration is the likely cause of long term chip failure in these instances. The circuit board on which you find high count ICs is a throwaway item.
The Pause in Moores’ Law
No doubt, something will come along to allow Moores’ law to again provide speed and density improvements, but for the last 5 years (as of April, 2020), we have been stuck at a particular minimum feature size of a transistor on a modern processor chip. There is a good deal of work on making more efficient designs of logic elements, but currently nothing close to the multiplicative improvements of Moores’ law.
I mention Moores’ Law in the faint hope that cooler heads will prevail upon us to, at least, make complex ICs reusable/reprogrammable.
Note: A short list of possible improvements
- 3D Stacking of elements
- New materials
- Innovative logic configurations