By David Lammers

It’s Christmas, and I bought a Kindle Fire to celebrate.

I probably won’t get any other presents this year, because my wife’s mother died at age 82 in Fukushima on Nov. 21st.  By Buddhist tradition the family doesn’t celebrate for 49 days, and so Mieko suggested we do without the usual rounds of gift exchanges this Christmas.

I still have an earlier e-Ink Kindle, which uses Amazon’s “Whispernet” cellular network, useful in airports where free WiFi is not always readily available. The original Kindle’s display was less power hungry, and non-reflective, which made it easier to read in a brightly lit room. Also, one of my favorite subscriptions through Amazon.com was the Reuters “News of the Day,” which gave me half a dozen breaking news stories for just $0.99 a month. Reuters offers a more-comprehensive subscription on the Kindle Fire, but for $9.99 a month.

One reason I bought the Kindle Fire had to do with the clicking sound when pushing the “Next Page” button on the original Kindle. My wife would be in bed trying to fall asleep, hear a few of those clicks, and request quiet. The Kindle Fire has a color touch screen and is silent as the pages turn. And the screen is bigger, which means fewer pages need be turned. However, the Kindle Fire is probably twice the weight of the original Kindle, another drawback when reading for a long time — but when compared to a good-sized book, the weight is probably about the same.

Tablet computers fill an obvious need: something to hold comfortably in bed which combines the ability to read and surf the Web. Nobody wants a hot and heavy laptop resting on their knees in bed, and smartphones are too small for long reading sessions.

The original Kindle got me started down the road of buying Amazon digital subscriptions to e-magazines. The M.I.T. Technology Review, The Atlantic, the aforementioned Reuters newsfeed, and the New York Times Review of Books, together cost about $10 per month.

Things got better, but more complicated, when I discovered the Calibre software. I did a Google search on how to convert a book from the standard EPUB format to the MOBI format which the original Kindle supports. Calibre was the answer, and so much more than that.

Calibre is an access point to many hundreds of publications, including nearly 400 U.S. publications, about 25 in French, and dozens of other languages. I set up scheduled downloads for the free Associated Press news feed, Anandtech, IEEE Spectrum, and the Columbia Journalism Review. I “fetch” these publications, store them on my external hard drive, then load them to the Kindle Fire by plugging in the USB cord and letting Calibre transfer them in the correct Kindle format for either of my devices. Calibre also will find, download, and transfer e-books, of course, especially the free volumes which are no longer under copyright protection.

I also have learned how to download e-books from the Austin Public Library. That process was interesting as well. I went down to the Austin downtown library to return some print books, and spoke to a librarian who told me the Austin library is part of the national network of libraries which support the Overdrive system of handling e-books. The Austin library has subscribed to the digital rights to 4,500 volumes, he said, not all of which are in the Kindle format. Another 34,000 e-books (mostly beyond copyright protection) can be had through the Gutenberg Project. I found several recently released e-books which I wanted to read, but they were already “checked out” so I put them on hold.

I did find a Kindle e-book I wanted to check out from the library, a biography of Gandhi (Great Soul, by Joseph Lelyveld.) To actually get the e-book, I needed to check it out from the Austin library, and then quickly log in to my Amazon account, where I found it in my account for free downloading. Though the book is free, and I didn’t have to drive downtown to the library to get it, I was able to check it out for only 14 days. Three days before it was set to expire, I got a message from savvy Amazon asking me if I wanted to buy a digital copy of the Gandhi biography, which I avoided by spending most of Christmas Day finishing the book. Mission accomplished.

Another source of “free” e-books is through the Amazon Prime membership, which costs $79 per year. I am trying this for a year to see if I get my money’s worth. Besides the Kindle lending library of “free” e-books and videos for Prime subscribers, the main attraction is free shipping. But I’m not sure I will buy that much stuff which needs to be shipped. In fact, a print book I bought as a gift for my daughter (“Makioka Sisters” by Junichiro Tanizaki, about a family in pre-War Osaka) did not qualify for free shipping, because it came from a non-Amazon book vendor.

I had lunch with “LithoGuru” blogger Chris Mack shortly before Christmas, and found that Chris has one of the large-format e-Ink Kindles, which I didn’t know existed. Chris teaches at the University of Texas now and also does quite a bit of expert witness testimony in patent disputes around the country. Rather than carry a heavy bunch of  60-70 page printouts of patents, Chris loads the PDFs on to his Kindle and reads them on the airplane. Makes sense. And Chris reports that his wife Susan is an avid e-book reader, devouring a couple of digital volumes every week.

I readily admit that Amazon is channeling its Kindle customers to its proprietary library of e-books and movies, much as Apple sends people to iTunes. There are other affordable options out there. A Sony tablet running Android is recommended by Kovid Goyal, the Calibre code writer, and my tech-savvy neighbor Roland Schwarz is still trying to find a good deal on the discontinued but still sought-after H-P Touchpad.

The $199 Kindle Fire is a good deal, and finding free content for it has been particularly entertaining. Next up: download some free movies. Call me Scrooge, but free is good.

By David Lammers

The just-concluded 2011 IEDM in Washington, D.C. had three tracks, to my mind, and trying to make sense of it all is a long process. The first theme was the continuing debate over just how manufacturable (or not?) finFETs will be over the next two or three years, and how fully-depleted SOI and the SuVolta Deeply Depleted Channel approaches will compete with bulk finFETs.

The second track was on memory technology: the competition between a never-say-die phase-change (PC-RAM), a resurgent spin-torque-transfer MRAM, IBM’s fascinating Racetrack memory technology as a replacement for HDDs, and the Resistive RAMs (RRAMs).

The third track was on further-out technologies, including graphene, tunnel FETs (probably on III-V materials) and nanowires (seen as an extension of thin-channel finFETs). And IEDM has “Other” category papers on flexible circuits and displays, biomedical devices, and the like.

This year’s IEDM came seven months after Intel Corp. unveiled its 22nm tri-gate technology, which might lead one to expect a more detailed IEDM presentation on tri-gate. This is a “Tick” year for Intel, meaning the emphasis is on bringing in a new process rather than a new microarchitecture: the “Tock” in Tick-Tock. But the 22nm “Ivy Bridge” processors are five or six months late, which means the reverse engineering specialists such as Chipworks (Ottowa, Canada) haven’t had a chance to get their hands on an Ivy Bridge chip. Until Dick James & Co. (Dick’s IEDM slides, presented an ASM International lunch, are available here) start in with their microphotography and analysis, Intel doesn’t have much motivation to detail its tri-gate structures and materials.

That didn’t stop everyone else from talking about finFETs. Scott Thompson, who ran the 90nm program at Intel before departing for the University of Florida in 2002, is now the CTO at SuVolta Inc. Thompson said Intel’s tri-gate-based Ivy Bridge processors are likely to draw about 77W at the same 3-3.5Ghz clock frequency as the 32nm Sandy Bridge products, which draw 95W.

Thompson said that works out to a 19 percent improvement in power consumption, and he argues that Intel could have saved about that much power with a planar 22nm transistor.

“That level of power reduction is about what you would see if you move a planar transistor from one node to the next.  The power reduction comes from a few factors, but the scaling of the transistor width (W) accounts for about 15-20% power reduction. So in 22nm it does not appear tri-gate helped that much,” he said.

To get any new technology out the door – including strain and high-k/ metal gate — many tradeoffs are made in the first-generation implementations. Intel, for example, was forced to implant dopants in the fins to adjust threshold voltages in the 22nm tri-gate transistors, Thompson said, adding that going forward Intel will figure out other ways to support multiple Vts without degrading the channel mobility in the fins.

“The key for Intel is to first debug the manufacturing issues with tri-gate and set themselves up well for the next node (14nm), when they will take full advantage of tri-gate. For Intel’s CPU market the physics suggest the gains should be meaningful,” he said.

Mark Bohr, Intel’s director of process architecture, gave a keynote speech to open IEDM. Bohr said the tri-gate transistors provide a 37% gate delay improvement at 0.7V or a 50% active power reduction at constant performance when compared to Intel’s 32 nm logic technology “on a comprehensive set of benchmark circuits.”

If tri-gate delivers a much better sub-threshold swing, and slices 0.2V from the Vdd, that will be quickly proven when the 22nm MPUs emerge in personal computers next year. It will have been late, but worth the wait.

Attributes and challenges, with "no perfect options" facing designers, STMicro said. (Source: IEDM 2011 presentation)

What about fully depleted SOI (FD-SOI)? STMicroelectronics was the first company to describe its plans to use a FD-SOI process for its 28nm CMOS platform. What grabbed my attention is that STMicro’s program manager Franck Arnaud also said STMicro would use TSVs to support broadband links to a DDR DRAM, and have embedded DRAM on the logic die at some point during the 28nm generation. “The eDRAM was presented as a bulk option,” Arnaud said in a follow-up e-mail. The TSVs support a wide IO approach, with 1,024 TSVs in parallel.

“We plan to get our first SoC based on FD-SOI out in the second quarter of 2012. Integration with TSVs is targeted for later on,” he said.

The STMicro 28nm FD-SOI technology has a back biasing capability, which means that a control gate under the 25nm buried oxide layer can be used at the device level to either raise or lower the threshold voltage by 100mV, delivering extra performance or power savings, as needed. There is no body factor to take into account, said Michel Haond, director of FD-SOI process integration at STMicro, during the Q&A session after the presentation.

Besides Soitec and its two SOI 300mm wafer factories (Bernin, France, and Singapore), STMicro will draw upon MEMC (St. Louis), and Japan’s Shin Etsu Handotai (SEH) for competitively priced wafer supplies, Arnaud and Haond said. “The process flow with FD-SOI is simpler, with fewer implant steps than bulk. That compensates for the SOI wafer cost totally,” Arnaud said.

There are a couple of things to watch out for in 2012 regarding SOI. One is IBM’s direction, as they could support a bulk or SOI finFET, and/or FD-SOI planar architecture, or all three, at the 14nm node. A planar FD-SOI supports multiple Vts for SoC applications and delivers a competitive effective drive current (Ieff) for high-performance circuits, according to IBM research manager Bruce Doris.

IBM has used an embedded DRAM technology extensively for its Power series of server MPUs, based on an SOI technology, which is denser than SRAM while delivering 2ns-class access times. I asked a couple of IBM technologists at IEDM if — with much of IBM’s design and IP resources tuned to SOI — the SOI eDRAM would keep IBM on either a planar or vertical SOI platform. They said the SOI eDRAM was “one consideration we are taking into account.”

GlobalFoundries is another company expected to make a 14nm announcement soon. At the Global Technology Conference in Santa Clara in the late summer, CTO Greg Bartlett said GlobalFoundries would use some form of fully depleted technology at the 14nm node, but he didn’t say if that would be a planar or a vertical transistor. At IEDM, Ali Keshavarzi of the GlobalFoundries R&D group gave a presentation describing the attributes of a fully depleted finFET transistor.

GlobalFoundries R&D Group listed 10 Key Performance Indicators as it considers its 14nm options. (Source: 2011 IEDM)

Keshavarzi emphasized the tradeoffs between power vs. performance at a given cost, or PPC, an acronym that could become part of the mainstream lexicon.

And what about SuVolta, which partnered with Fujitsu to show stable SRAM operation in the 0.5V regime? Several technologists said the SuVolta approach appears to be based on a steep retrograde well process, which Thompson did not deny, noting that there is more to the SuVolta recipe than its implant scheme. One source said companies with patent portfolios on retrograde wells may be cautious before signing up with SuVolta. The SuVolta approach, he argued, “may appeal to second tier fabless companies” which seek to avoid a lot of EDA/IP porting costs. Thompson appeared confident that SuVolta would gain traction, fitting in for semiconductor companies that don’t want to take the leap to finFETs, with their myriad manufacturing complexities.

Thoughout the IEDM, starting with a Sunday short course presentation by Intel’s Ian Young, the challenge of reducing external resistance (Rext) was emphasized, with contact resistance as one of the most-challenging hurdles going forward.

Greg Yeric, an ARM technologist, gave an invited paper on a designer’s perspective of scaling issues. FinFETs have narrow width effects, he noted, saying “W matters. In critical paths, which often are folded, we are now seeing contacts with twice the resistance (of thick Ws). Parasitic capacitance as a function of W is becoming a serious issue,” Yeric said.