Known Good Die is more commonly a term used to signify that bare die or unpackaged ICs have some quality or reliability. We have borrowed it as a simple tag for academic tape outs that we would like to highlight to the community. There are many examples of these and we hope to build a reference of these here as a resource for the community. If you want to add an example then sign up and add it or contact us if you just want to make us aware of it and we can do it.

Known Good Die
Tutu Ajayi / University of Michigan

65nm SoC with M0 for mixed signal design inc. temperature sensors

The SoC uses a M0 core with 2 PLLs, 3 LDOs, 16KB SRAM, and 2 temperature sensors and was fabricated to aid in the evaluation of a mixed-signal SoC design framework with a number of analog block generators. It uses the AMBA™ APB protocol as the register interface to all blocks.

The temperature sensor has an area of 2,620µm2 . A 2-pt calibration is performed at 0°C and 80°C. Measured results show a sensing range between -20°C and 100°C with an accuracy of ±4°C. The generated SRAM has an area of 0.68mm2 and a custom bitcell area of 0.4mm2 .

Node
65nm
Technology

Cortex-M0

Known Good Die
University of Michigan

SoC with M3 core in 3D stack solar powered sensor

A 3D integrated sensor system with an M3 microprocessor powered by solar cells with battery storage. It operates near threshold at 73kHz with the Wake-Up Interrupt Controller only bringing the core out of ultra-low leakage mode to take the necessary sensor readings. The system uses power gating and voltage scaling as well as custom SRAM was developed to minimize leakage power during sleep mode.

Technology

Cortex-M3 Interrupt Controllers

Interests

Low power design

Known Good Die
P. N. Whatmough et al. 2019 Symposium on VLSI Circuits

16nm SoC with A53 and eFPGA for flexible acceleration

A 25mm2 SoC in 16nm FinFET technology targeting flexible acceleration of compute intensive kernels in DNN, DSP and security algorithms. The SoC includes an always-on sub-system, a dual-core Arm A53 CPU cluster, an embedded FPGA array, and a quad-core cache-coherent accelerator cluster.

Foundry
TSMC
Node
16nm
Technology

Cortex-A53 Accelerators

Known Good Die
Copyright 2022 © Arm and University of Southampton | All Rights Reserved

ICL Experimenter 2018

Taped-out in May 2018, ICL-Experimenter is the first in a series of Arm-ECS research centre test-chips designed to explore wireless 3D integration using inductive coupling links. The chip was fabricated in AMS 0.35um technology with two vertically stacked dies within each IC. This initial prototype contains eight wireless channels, each of which communicates over a distance of 120um (through 100um of silicon substrate + 20um of epoxy adhesive) and focusses on exploring different transceiver designs and inductor layouts.

Technology

Wi-Fi

Known Good Die
Copyright 2022 © Arm and University of Southampton | All Rights Reserved

COILS-C1 65nm SoC with M0 cores in 3D stack

Low-cost 3D die stacking using near-field wireless communication.

This two-tier SoC, fabricated using a TSMC 65nm process, incorporates two Arm Cortex M0 CPU cores in addition to a wireless vertical AHB lite bus for inter-layer power and data transfer. The wireless AHB-Lite bus consists of four, 250um diameter, inductive channels to simultaneously transmit data (at speeds up to 6Gbps) and wirelessly transfer power, whilst also allowing ‘plug-and-play’ integration with existing SoC AHB-Lite peripherals.

Foundry
TNCM
Node
65nm
Technology

Cortex-M0 Peripherals

Known Good Die
Copyright 2022 © Arm and University of Southampton | All Rights Reserved

Pipistrelle-4 65nm low power multi-project SoC

Pipistrelle-4, is the latest in a series SoCs for demonstrating multiple student projects in low-energy systems. Various circuit/system ideas from multiple researcher focusing on energy and performance with optimised SRAM bitcell and low-area overhead energy-efficient flip-flops.

Previous chips in this series include;

Interests

Low power design