Originally Posted by
JumpingJack
Oddly, bulk transistors have improved performance with every node, and has so since scaling began. There is nothing wrong with bulk transistor performance and improvement within the progression of Moore's Law, in fact bulk PMOS holds the record (well above SOI) for drive currents.
We are arguing semantics, saying it fixes something implies that it is broken and that is indeed not the case. HKMG is an example of a fix, because SiON scaling is broken, it stopped after 90 nm (bulk, SOI or otherwise). In fact, AMD's 45 nm transistors increased the SiON thickness from 1.3 nm to 1.4 nm, if I recall correctly.
One could turn the argument on it's ear, bulk technology fixes the problems with SOI (1/2 the self-heating, no floating body effect, yada yada yada). All things considered, SOI is a different way of isolating the transistor body from the substrate, and carries with it better parametrics in some areas and problematic issues in other areas. Engineering the best transistor on bulk will not yield the same result if that were simply transported to an SOI substrate and vice versa. Hence, these claims of 'better' this and 'higher' that of SOI over bulk need to be understood in the right context, simply engineering the best transistor on SOI then building the same transistor on bulk will always yield a better result on SOI.
IBM, when they were evangalizing SOI as the next best thing, claimed that scaling on bulk was dead, that SOI was the only option. Intel claimed that bulk would continue scaling and at lower costs. So far, bulk has indeed continued scaling -- even when IBM claimed it would not be possible after 90 nm.
