Industry roadmaps: The challenge of complexity

Abstract

The history of VLSI, has been marked since the early 70′s, by an exponential growth rate, with a new generation appearing every three years. Recent announcements by major manufacturers confirm this trend, and the Semiconductor Industry Association has tried, in a recent study, to extrapolate it to year 2010, evidencing the major constraints and the critical issues. However, if we take as an example the roadmap of the Flash memories, which will be one of the major device families around year 2000, we can see potentially critical issues that could slow down the growth rate: on one side the increased circuit complexity will force to push defect density down to values that are hardly conceivable today, on the other side the increasing cost of facilities, coupled to a constant reduction of the price/implemented function will strongly affect the picture of the semiconductor industry, drastically reducing the number of major players. In order to stay competitive, semiconductor industry must take advantage of new equipment to pursue a program of constant product shrink and yield increase, turning rapidly into profit the huge investments for new equipment. Furthermore, the increase in equipment costs will reduce the number of equipment manufacturers, and their willingness to commit to expensive development programs will be conditioned by the presence of clear strategies on the side of silicon manufacturers.