Opportunities and Challenges in the Nanoelectronics Era

Speaker: Mark R. Pinto
Applied Materials, USA
mark_pinto@amat.com


 

Synopsis
For decades the scalability of MOS technology has fostered continual improvements in almost every dimension of electronic products. However at ~130nm, VLSI has neared a variety of limits threatening numerous compromises. In response the industry has returned to a state more like the 1960s/70s where new directions in materials, processes and devices are being intensively evaluated. However the complexity of the challenge today is many orders of magnitude higher, e.g. controlling atomic thickness over billions of components, while the economic pressures, both on development expense as well as time to yield, are driving a new industry landscape. This presentation explores key VLSI technology challenges and reviews some of the main industry directions – many times across traditional boundaries – in order to drive continued end market success in the sub-100nm, nanoelectronics domain.

 
Integration Beyond Digital Electronics

Speaker: Jim Hollenhorst


 

Synopsis
The exponential progress in electronics over the last fifty years is unprecedented in human history. Digital electronics has been the primary beneficiary of this progress. While the trend will continue, we see large opportunities for growth and many interesting research challenges in areas outside digital electronics, but leveraging the great success there. For example, there are many opportunities for integration in the transducer technologies that connect digital electronics to the real world of analog signals. Examples using CMOS technology include CMOS imagers, RF CMOS, and massively parallel analog electronics for high-speed communications and for analog-to-digital converters for instrumentation. Beyond this, there are many interesting applications of MEMS technology, including the film bulk acoustic resonator that has been successfully deployed in cell phones. Finally, the techniques of integration are being applied to the life sciences. Commercially successful examples include microfluidic "lab-on-a-chip" technologies and DNA microarrays. Future applications may include rapid sequencing of DNA. All of these applications can benefit from the small size, low cost, and high performance attributes that have made integration of digital electronics so successful.

 
RF TECHNOLOGY ROADMAPS:
CAN RF TECHNOLOGIES KEEP PACE WITH MOORE’S LAW?

Speaker: Eric W. Strid
Cascade Microtech, Inc. 2430 NW 206th Avenue, Beaverton, Oregon, USA


 

Synopsis
In the past decade the continuous device performance improvements achieved by process scaling have enabled active components for wireless and high-speed digital systems to achieve price-performance improvement rates typical of logic ICs since the 1970’s. However, wireless communication systems also require RF-specific technologies, such as narrowband filters, high-efficiency power amplifiers, low-loss RF switches, and very high isolation. Scaling these RF components in size and cost to keep up with the scaling rate of mainstream semiconductor technologies will require new approaches to overcome the practical physical and economic limits. New wireless system architectures will evolve to mitigate these limitations, and will operate through 100 GHz but still be limited in bandwidth and range. Digital interconnects above 10 Gbps are similarly running into non-scalable physical limits, both within a chip and within a rack, and new wideband interconnect technologies are required to continue scaling digital system performance.

Abstract