downside to a thicker gate oxide
Certainly... there is a reason they have kept reducing it. in general, thinner oxide makes the transistors faster... as such I don't expect too much speed improvement out of the logic gates on 65nm, but I think interconnect is already a significant portion of the delay so this is not a huge impact. In addition, as I noted, I expect VCC to stay the same. When they scale the oxide they also reduce VCC, and active power drops as the square of VCC so this is a huge active power savings. With a significant portion of power now being in the "leakage" category this is probably a positive trade off.
I do think there may be some negative implications to sub-threshold leakage for staying with the thicker oxide. Perhaps chipguy could chime in on this issue?
Thanks,
Alan
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