ABSTRACT
The electronic products industry has been able to provide end users with a variety of devices featuring amazing functionality, which can be purchased at a decreasing cost per device. This is the outcome of advances in manufacturing technologies, which enabled the integration of enormous numbers of transistors, gates, and storage elements in very small areas of silicon. Reduction of the circuit elements’ dimensions was the result of manufacturing industry efforts and investments over the last three decades and is usually called feature scaling or technology scaling. The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) [1] summarizes the main implications that feature scaling has in integrated circuits (ICs) development. Feature scaling, as presented in Table 46.1, drives important improvements in IC characteristics.
