90 Nanometer Gate Length.

The slide shows typical parameters from a 90 nanometer standard cell library. This figure refers to the width of the gate in the field effect transistors. The smaller this width, the faster than transistor can operate, but also it will consume more power as static leakage current. The 90 nm figure has been the mainstream VLSI technology in the period 2004-2008, but now 40-45 nanometer technology is widely used with smaller 22 nm becoming mainstream.

Typical processor core: 200k gates + 4 RAMs: one square millimeter.

A typical SoC chip area is 50-100 mm² with 20-40 million gates. Actual gate and transistor count would be higher owing to custom blocks (RAMs mainly), that achieve a better denisty than standard cells.

The FO4 delay is the delay through an inverter that is feeding four other nearby inverters (fan out of four).

» Moore's Law has been tracked for the last two plus decades, but have we now reached the Silicon End Point? That is, can we no longer make things smaller (at the same cost)? Modern workstation processors have certainly demonstrated a departure from the previous trend of ever rising clock frequencies: instead they have several cores.