Moortec Semiconductor Ltd develop on-chip monitoring circuits and intellectual property (IP)
for silicon chip devices manufactured on advanced technologies used in today’s electronic
products. Moortec plan to develop an innovative high-accuracy, reliable and testable
embedded Temperature Sensor (TS) prototype IP that will measure the temperature of circuits
manufactured on 16 nano-meter (nm) finFET advanced CMOS technology nodes. With
advances in silicon CMOS technology and the scaling of transistor channel lengths to nanometer
dimensions, the density of digital circuits per unit area of silicon has increased. This
increase in digital logic (or gate) density, which equates to an increase in power density, has
become a major contributor to the heating of System on Chip (SoC) devices manufactured on
advanced CMOS nodes. The 16nm fin-FET (fin-based Field-Effect Transistor) technology is a
cutting-edge technology for the manufacture of chips and Moortec’s high accuracy
temperature sensor will possess features and address applications that go beyond what is
currently commercially available to the designers and developers of semiconductor devices.
The primary application for on-chip temperature monitoring is performance optimisation, one
such scheme being Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) where depending on the
thermal conditions, system clocks and voltage supplies can be varied to optimise either the
speed of logical operations or power consumed by the device. For safety critical devices, the
silicon temperature can be measured and monitored by the system, potentially throughout the
lifetime of the device, allowing algorithms to be used to avoid high temperatures and hence
high stress to the device. The outcome of the project will be a silicon-proven 16nm
temperature sensor IP that will be licensed to SoC developers world-wide. Moortec’s aim is to
become the primary IP vendor for on-chip PVT monitoring solutions for advanced node
semiconductors worldwide.