Paper PS-MoA11
Silicon Processing Technologies in Adjacent Spaces: Applications Beyond Information Technology

Monday, October 20, 2008, 5:20 pm, Room 304

Over the course of the last fifty years, the microelectronics industry has made tremendous strides in the development and manufacturing of ever more complex integrated circuits (IC). These circuits have typically been applied to the information technology (IT) industry and have driven improvements in the computational power per dollar of many orders of magnitude. Part of the “toolbox” of skills acquired to produce integrated circuits is the ability to form desired patterns at ever decreasing sizes. The minimum controllable feature size has been reduced by six orders of magnitude (from millimeters to nanometers) during the last fifty years. With feature sizes rapidly approaching 10nm, the conventional silicon IC industry is nearing a threshold with the end of conventional silicon scaling approaching. Research today focuses on new device structure to replace the CMOSFET as the engine of the IT industry. Another very active research area is the concept of taking the skill-set acquired from IC research, development, and manufacturing, and to apply those skills into new area – “adjacent spaces” where the ability to machine patterns at very small sizes may open up new areas of research and development, and to form the basis for future industries.