The future of CMOS - Limits and opportunities

Abstract

The development of CMOS technology is always driven by system needs. Traditionally, these needs have been met quite satisfactorily by simply reducing the physical size of the transistors as guided by the MOSFET scaling theory and increasing the chip-level integration density as anticipated from "Moore's Law." Now that CMOS has reached some of its key scaling limits, continued progress has to come from innovations beyond the traditional development paths, again guided by anticipating and addressing system designers' concerns and needs. To make real progress, we need to understand where CMOS scaling has run into limits and where the new barriers are. In this talk, we examine the factors limiting the scaling of CMOS as well as the opportunities for extending current CMOS technology to continue satisfying the needs of system designers. © The Electrochemical Society.