Grasping Particle-Beam Isolation Technology, and Winning in Coming SOC Era

The advent of ultra deep sub-micron silicon technology (of gate length 0.13 μm and below) has triggered a strong motive to integrate multiple existing functions onto a single chip, called system-on-a-chip or SOC. This is desirable from the consumers’ perspective, as it will, eventually, reduce the overall system cost, size, and power consumption dramatically while enhancing product performance and functionality. However, this worldwide trend provoked mixed feelings among production firms. On the bright side, it gives enormous hopes for a variety of potentially large markets; on the dark side, SOC-related problems are much more involved and deceiving than at first glance. Aside from complicated verification issues related to IP (intellectual property) re-use integration in general, it is technically very challenging to place extremely noise-sensitive RF or analog blocks side by side with relatively noisy digital (or even analog) blocks on the same silicon (or SiGe) substrate.