SemiSerious

Today Laura Peters from Semiconductor International (the other SI) hosted a webcast providing an overview of the contents of the upcoming 2007 Edition of the Semiconductor Industry Association’s (SIA) roadmap for technology - the ITRS. If there is anyone who really knows what’s in that upcoming document, it is Intel’s Alan Allan, and he gave the presentation. It’s the second time I’ve had the chance to listen to this Intel guru (see first time, here). This time Allan focused his thoughts on diversification of the ITRS to “more than Moore.” Scaling and Moore’s Law have been the rails for the semiconductor industry since its early days, but there is only so much that physical scaling can do and some places it’s just not at home.

The most obvious technology that gives us more without Moore is MEMS. Micro (or nano) electromechanical systems (MEMS) are at the heart of many systems from air bag deployment to Nintendo Wii game controllers. For Alan Allan and other industry luminaries, turning their attention to the critical part of consumer electronics systems to where the rubber meets the road is part recognition of the importance of the overall system or product and part realization that many aspects of scaling are creating more trouble than they are worth. Those troubles include increasing power consumption and capital consumption to get a cutting-edge chip designed, fabbed and into the market.

Sensors and actuators, or the way microelectronics actually interacts with our physical world, are a critical aspect of everything in our new digital age. Portable music players are ubiquitous primarily because of digital representation and storage of content, but they still need to drive something that can render an analog signal (that’s sound to a headphone if that last bit was too obtuse). You can add as much digital signal processing horsepower you want to a car, but it isn’t going to detect and correct a skid if there isn’t an analog detector at the front end of the signal path. And sensors - in particular MEMS devices - have no need for the latest lithography or the fastest transistors. MEMS technology is most at home in older, sometimes fully depreciated fabs.

Most of the “more than Moore” diatribe above is my own. I apologize and reward you for reading this far with a couple of comments made by the other ITRS representatives who were on hand for answering questions at the webcast. These actually relate more to Moore and traditional scaling issues.

When will EUV be ready? Will Conley, one of Freescale’s members of the lithography working group, answered that the next generation of litho will be ready for 22nm but not before. As for nanoimprint, he said this will only be used for “early device learning” until throughput can be improved.

I took note of a couple of other questions about interconnect. Chris Case (of the Linde Group) said there would not be a “materials” solution to inter-level dielectric constant below 2.0. He quickly added that there will be an air gap combination approach to get below k=2.0. Alan Allan also addressed the slowing of reductions in effective k values and many unresolved problems in technologies that are getting closer to their required introduction date (red brick wall for 2012). Chris Case also pointed out that 3D interconnect technology is well-proven in development fabs and will be ready when the industry is ready to take the plunge.

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