Abstract:
Scaling roadmaps are facing a cross point where only educated impact assessments and a healthy mix between continuity and disruption will lead the way. Metrics from the past will not apply anymore. New metrics come in, but the reign of continued system improvement through technology advancement and miniaturization will remain.
After more than 50 years of scaling transistor density and performance, we are entering a new era. Today’s trends in technology, the move towards an IoT with a huge amount of small and smart connected devices and a cloud-based infrastructure, put more focus than ever on e.g. bandwidth, connectivity, sensing, and power-efficiency. Such scale of systems and applications will be served by a widened spectrum of application-driven technology platforms, each building on different components and materials, architectures and interconnection tradeoffs.
This presentation will bring the encouraging news from the imec ‘kitchen’ that many options and concepts are out there to make a viable path towards “node 5” and beyond, but the challenge is that even more R&D will be required to study the viability of all such concepts not only in terms of materials, equipment and process integration, but also into their circuit and application environment. Next to further transistor scaling, this will also require to add functionality: integration of memory and processing, better context awareness and security, advanced communication, co-integration of heterogeneous systems. Let’s look at scaling from that new perspective, see where it is heading to and what will be needed to make it a success.