Advancing Moore's law: Challenges and opportunities

Abstract

Summary form only given. Moore's law has been the guiding principle of silicon CMOS technology scaling for four decades. Transistor density has been doubled every two years in Intel microprocessors since early 70. Intel's latest dual core Itanium® 2 server chip has deployed 1.72 billion transistors vs. 2,250 transistors in the 4004 processor introduced in 1971. Same density improvement trends can be found in memory and other ASIC products as well. The remarkable progress in packing more functionality, complexity, and performance into a single silicon chip could have not been achieved without numerous innovations in IC manufacturing technologies, lithography, transistors, interconnects and packaging. In this presentation, the author provides a review of most critical process technology innovations in the last decade, including advanced lithography, strained silicon transistors, high k/metal gate transistors, Cu metallization, and low k ILD. The last decade of Moore's law has been characterized by significant differences, compared to the first three decades of silicon scaling, in the types of technical challenges and innovations that are required to advance Moore's law. The insight into the challenges and opportunities will help guide advancing Moore's law into the future.