Custom Integrated Circuits Conference

The Keynote Speaker for the 2011 CICC is James D. Meindl, Georgia Institute of Technology. His presentation is titled "Nanoelectronics: What's Next?". Since 1960 silicon microchip technology has advanced in productivity by the astounding factor of one billion times. Concurrently, the performance of microchips, for example a microprocessor chip, has increased by a factor of approximately one million times since the early 1970’s. These two concurrent advances are unmatched in technological history. The salient objective of this discussion is to provide an incisive response to the question: what’s next? Reducing the minimum feature size (F) of transistors and interconnects in a microchip or scaling has been the single most potent factor enabling the huge improvements in both productivity and performance of microchips during the past half century. To be more specific, transistor printed gate length has been scaled from 25 µm to 25nm or by a factor of 1000x. However, within the next decade limitations such as gate tunneling current and subthreshold drain-to-source current will demand the introduction of new high permittivity gate insulators and metal gates. These new materials and new device structures such as the vertical FinFET will be necessary to enable continued scaling albeit at a substantially reduced rate. A transition from 193 nm optical lithography to EUV technology will also be necessary to support scaling to the sub-10nm region. As the advance of intrinsic silicon technology nears a saturation point in the sub-10nm range, opportunities for ancillary technology and especially for three-dimensional (3D) integration will become vigorously pursued. Stacking of low power flash memory chips is now a production technology but stacks of microprocessor and memory chips, for example, in a high performance multi-core processor are not yet in use particularly due to heat removal limitations. However, promising innovative approaches to electrical interconnection and liquid cooling of a stack using electrical and fluidic through-silicon vias have been presented. Beyond another decade of silicon technology advances, perhaps the most promising prospect that is under intense investigation is graphene, particularly due to its ballistic carrier transport, adjustable energy band gap of nanoribbons and potential for fusion of top-down and bottom-up nanotechnology.