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The persistent push to shrinking process nodes continues, with many designs today manufactured using 45nm processes. Smaller process nodes are used primarily to reduce the area, thus the cost, of chips. For forty years, the decreased transistor and wire sizes also brought increased speed and reduced power consumption, but those benefits have declined as the devices approach atomic limits. The argeted gain in transistor density is accompanied by challenges of leakage, power management, timing predictability, and line printing fidelity for devices at these small dimensions. Recent ultra-conservative, restrictive design rules prevent layout from shrinking even as the gate length does. Both the physics of miniature devices and the available manufacturing methods require that the chip designers perform up-front planning and trade-offs to achieve manufacturing success. For example, voltage scaling has plateaued as a power reduction technique, and while high-k gates greatly reduce leakage power, architectural-level power management planning is required to reduce overall power consumption.
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