Views on News: On Mobility, Velocity Saturation and (110) Silicon
In recent years, the chip industry has pulled a couple of rabbits out of the hat: strained silicon and immersion lithography. Semiconductor International News Editor David Lammers asks, "Will (110) CMOS be the next rabbit?" The possible switch to (110) orientation for low-cost CMOS chips builds on a realization that for sub-100 nm gate lengths, mobility becomes a less meaningful concept than velocity saturation. And (110) CMOS could provide performance gains at virtually no additional processing costs.