Test silicon developed together with the University of British Columbia under a Canadian government sponsored MITACS programme was fabricated by Global Foundries in a standard 22nm FDSOI CMOS process, via CMC Microsystems.
“Un-switched capacitor-based signal processing that exhibits no thermal noise is a means to achieve the lowest possible current consumption in high performance signal processing,” said Martin Mallinson, Chief Scientist and Founder at SiliconIntervention, “and the use of quantum tunnelling found within thin gate oxides in today’s advanced CMOS processes can be used to great advantage in achieving just this.”
According to Martin, “In collaboration with UBC and CMC under the MITACS programme, we have developed a proof-of-concept chip that clearly demonstrates this valuable innovation.”
SiliconIntervention has developed a platform approach to leveraging the advantages inherent in analogue processing functions which it has named The New Analog.
“The New Analog platform has at its roots fundamental principles, including quantum tunnelling, taking advantage of process scaling, and just as importantly, also leveraging the non-idealities found in advanced CMOS nodes,” commented Allan Cox, CEO of SiliconIntervention. “And while tunnelling in transistor gate oxides becomes an increasingly difficult problem for the digital designer to accommodate, innovative use in analogue circuit design has now been shown to be the basis for a new generation of state-of-the-art low power circuits from amplifiers to data converters and the whole spectrum of analogue and mixed signal devices”.
