IC Performance Issues
Edited by David Barth, 7 December 2008
from page 78 of the September 29, 2008 issue of Aviation Week & Space
Technology, by David Hughes.
IC Performance Issues at the time of this writing are as follows:
IC performance is directly related to the feature size of transistor gates. The smaller the gates, the faster a
device can operate. However, smaller gates can result in current leakage between components. Leakage can be solved by
using a “high-k” material stack containing hafnium that replaces a transistor’s silicone dioxide gate dielectric. A
dielectric is an insulator that inhibits current leakage.
Preliminary experiments indicate that radiation hardening by design (RHDB) can work with high-k materials. Radiation
hardening using the RHDB concept is accomplished by the design of the circuits in the way the transistors are arranged.
However, radiation hardening of a circuit by RHBD results in a loss of approximately one generation of performance from
that of an unmodified commercial chip.