The increasing requirements for body features - for greater memory size and better controller performance on the one hand, and for energy consumption on power down on the other - make new concepts necessary.
Higher performance and increasing features in semiconductor industries typically lead to the use of smaller structures. The latest structures being seen in automotive silicon devices are 0.18μ and 0.13μ. With these structures it is possible to achieve the requirements for performance and size of integrated memories.
The drawback of these technologies is a dramatic increase of leakage currents, especially when such devices are getting hot.
The paper will describe what can be done to get rid of such high leakage currents and how this was implemented in the latest 16/32 bit microcontroller family XC2000 from Infineon.
There are two ways to get rid of leakage current. The first is to lower the supply voltage and the second is to switch off the supply at parts of the device that are not needed in a power down mode.
The first samples that have implemented these new features are now available to serve the automotive industry for coming challenges.