A manufacturable and modular 0.25 /spl mu/m CMOS platform technology

A modular 0.25 /spl mu/m CMOS core technology suitable for high density and high-performance or low-power applications is presented. The key salient features include: simple 1-mask STI, 40 /spl Aring/ high-performance or low-power CMOS transistor modules, cobalt salicide, a practical 2D Optical Proximity Correction (OPC) technique applied to tight-pitch local interconnect and 6-level tiled metallization backend that include unlanded vias and no-cap Inter-Level Dielectric (ILD). This technology is capable of producing state-of-the-art 380 MHz RISC microprocessors (47 mm/sup 2/) with 9.4 /spl mu/m/sup 2/ 6 T bitcell SRAM. The modularity of the process architecture allows the subsequent expansion of the integration to a wide-range of applications.