Ultralarge scale integration in CMOS technology

The unstoppable rush toward more and more shrinking the size has characterized the electronics in the last few decades, showing progressively more and more problems which were totally unknown to designers until the end of the last century. In this book, we will virtually perform what is commonly called the reverse engineering of the state-of-art electronic chips. Entering them, we will discover what they contain and which are the features in the front-end-of-line and in the back-end-of-line introduced to overcome those problems related to aggressive shrinking. We will understand that we are obliged to obey to an unavoidable compromise among performance, reliability, variability and cost, which is deciding the destiny and the future of integrated electronics.