(Gordon E. Moore Award) Impact of Micro-/Nano-Electronics, Miniaturization Limit, and Technology Development for the Next 10 Years and After

Abstract

Electronics started at the beginning of the 20th century with the invention of vacuum tubes. Since then, downsizing of the electron devices has started in order to improve the cost, operational speed, power consumption, volume, weight, etc. In the early 1970s, 10 μm PMOS LSI (large scale integrated circuits) technology provided the first microprocessor. This was the beginning of micro-electronics. Now, the minimum feature size of CMOSLSIs has reached 10 nm range and we call it ‘nano-electronics’. Probably, electronics was the most important technological revolution in the 20th century. Then, micro-/nano-electronics is the 2nd revolution. Without the micro-/nano-electronics, today’s smart society with internet and artificial intelligence would not exist. For the further progress of the modern smart society, the continuation of the MOSFET downsizing is important. The downsizing is expected to reach its limit very soon when the gate length of MOSFETs reaches around 10 nm, by the practical reasons which are the increase of off-leakage current and the saturation in performance, as well as the cost increase. However, until reaching the limit, there are so many things to develop in order to keep the Moore’s law as long as the merit is still huge. They are 3D integration, introduction of new materials into interconnects, and resolution improvement of EUV lithography. Finally, Moore’s law is expected to stop in 10 years or so, but the market demands for the CMOSLSIs as well as other semiconductor devices will keep increasing in the future smart society.