This will enable developers to more easily hit their power budgets and successfully exploit the capabilities of these mature FinFET processes.
“FinFET was developed to address the increasingly 
poor leakage characteristics of bulk nodes,” says sure mCore CEO Paul Wells, “in addition, the key driver for the mobile sector was ever greater performance to deliver new features and a better user experience. The power consumption was not deemed a significant issue, as both the radio and the display were the dominant factors in battery life determination.”
”This, in addition, to the relatively large form factor of a mobile phone meant that the batteries had capacities in excess of 3-4000mAh,” says Wells, “however, designers of power sensitive applications such as wearables and medical devices with much more constrained form factors and hence smaller batteries need a range of power optimised IP that can exploit the power advantages of FinFET whilst being much less concerned about performance. This has meant a demand for memory solutions that are specifically tailored to deliver much reduced power consumption. By providing the PowerMiser SRAM IP, sureCore is enabling the shift to mature FinFET processes for low power applications and is thus helping to provide clear differentiation for such products based on both cost and battery life. By doing so, the all-important competitive advantage over rivals may be realised.”
The mature FinFET nodes are rapidly becoming an interesting option for companies focused on low power applications like wearables, IoT and medical.
With an attractive combination of performance, density and yield, these nodes can deliver some very compelling trade-offs, in particular cutting operating voltages to deliver substantial power savings whilst still delivering the requisite performance metrics.
With 16nm now having been in production for over ten years, not only have the foundries ironed out manufacturing issues, but the tooling is now also largely depreciated meaning that a technology that was once the heralded solution for the demands of the HPC and mobile sectors has now become cost competitive for developers of power sensitive devices.
