Microprocessor Essay

1666 Words4 Pages

Advancement in Si-microprocessor due to changing device structure and design

1. Introduction

This paper deals with technological and structural design changes that are bringing the microprocessor to an extremely higher level. We will see how SOI technology has revolutionized the way chips were being made. These Si-microprocessors has made our life extremely sophisticated and it has seen a thousand fold increase since their invention. Focus nowadays is primarily on how reduce heat generation, power consumption and its size and increase its output power. The main concern of the designers is parallelism, reliability, structural optimization preferably better synergy etc.

2. Evolution of Microprocessor

With the coming of Moore’s Law in picture after 1975, the case was made for continued wafer and die size growth, defect density reduction, and increased transistor density as technology scaled and manufacturing matured. Transistor count in leading microprocessors has doubled in each technology node, appropriately every 2 years. Factors that drove up transistor count are increasingly complex processing cores, integration of multiple levels of caches, and inclusion of system functions. The frequency of a Microprocessor has almost doubled every generation resulting in advanced circuit design and more efficient transistors.. Die size has increased at 7% per year while feature size reduced by 30% every 2 to 3 years. Together, this fuel the transistor density growth as predicted by Moore’s Law. Die size is limited by the reticle size, power dissipation, and yield. Leading microprocessors typically have large die sizes that are reduced with more advanced process technology to improve frequency and yield. As feature size gets smaller, fi...

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... extent represented within the Intel Itanium Processor, security, scalability, delivering reliability, massive resources, parallelism and a new memory model based on a sound microarchitectural foundation. Because of its efficiency and so tiny in size and independence of out-of-order logic, the most advanced generation Itanium processor delivers best performance without any thermal generation problems. This quality of Itanium makes it a simple but efficient and refined engine that helps in consistent long-term improvement in code execution by small advancement in software, ultimately reducing the importance for significant new improvements in hardware. Microprocessor hardware advancements are becoming more and more difficult as time is progressing and even Moore believes that the exponential upward curve in microprocessor hardware advancements will not go forever.

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