In this paper, we discuss the advantages and opportunities presented by high-speed (> 50 GHz) reconfigurable integrated circuits and how they may drive reconfigurable systems applications, such as software-defined radio, radar, and imaging. We propose silicon-germanium (SiGe) BiCMOS as an example technology that enables ultrafast reconfigurable systems and present several circuit designs based on SiGe heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs). We compare circuit designs between generations of IBM's SiGe process, including a recent 9HP process featuring devices with a cutoff frequency (fT) of 300 GHz. We describe an architecture for an 8-b 80-Gs/s analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and a 48 × 48 cell field programmable gate array (FPGA), which provide powerful solutions for useful functions, such as digital signal processing (DSP) and polyphase filtering. Other circuit concepts are described, including a voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) with a tuning range of 26 GHz and a high-performance (80 Gb/s) crossbar switch, which provide utility in reconfigurable system applications. Measured results from fabricated implementations of these described systems are presented. We comment on future prospects of these systems and examine an emerging lateral bipolar device (fT1/4 825 GHz) having 100x less power consumption than conventional vertical HBTs.

This paper describes the capacitorless 1-transistor (1T) DRAMs exploits the floating body (FB) effect of Fully depleted (FD) SOI devices, where the transistor body is used as a charge storage node. A novel three-tier, 3D, 1T embedded DRAM is presented that can be vertically integrated with the microprocessor achieving low cost, high density on-chip main memory. A 394Kbits test chip is designed and fabricated in a 0.15um fully depleted SOI CMOS process. The measured retention time under holding conditions is higher than 10ms. In the continuous read mode, every read should be followed by a refresh. The test chip is designed to work with an access time of 50ns and operates at 10MHz.