Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[Maui]

Re : Can anyone give us any indication about what it would take to move K7 to 90nm, possibly with SOI?"

From physical design perspective, migrating data from 130nm to 90nm is a lot of work. The design rules (esp of lower layers like Poly, diffusion) are much worse than any previous generation and thus proess-shifting is not straight forward. OPC (optical Proximity Correction) begins to kick in a lot more requiring more effort. Cross Capacitance/Inductance and Noise issues would force lot more shielding. If the design is (re-)synthesized (as AMD is more inclined to do), it might throws off your timing convergence and can throw off your performance. And I haven't even seen the complexiity from SOI yet. Productivity can be improved somewhat, if area is traded off. But overall efoort required would not be insignificant.

Maui.