Industry Expert Blogs

Normal operation range for a Semiconductor device is not made equal for systems… If you consider a CPU running inside an aircraft engine control system, this device should operate at temperature ranged between -55°C and +125°C, when an Application Processor for smartphone is only required to operate in the 0°C to +70°C range. When Sidense announce that their OTP macros are fully qualified for -40ºC to 150°C read and field-programmable operations for TSMC’s 180nm BCD 1.8/5V/HV and G 1.8/5V processes, this represent a design challenge probably as difficult to meet that, for example, pushing a Cortex A9 ARM CPU embedded in a 28 nm Application Processor to run at 3 GHz instead of 1.5 GHz.

My very first job was in a characterization department and, even if the technology was CMOS 2 micron, the physics’ laws are still the same today, on a 28 nm or 180 nm technology. Both Temperature and Voltage are used to stress Silicon devices, in order to push it to their operating limits much faster. If you increase ambient temperature, a circuit will operate at lower frequency (and performance), and will be degraded much faster. Increasing the operating voltage will also “help” degrading the chip faster.