The future of electronics manufacturing is revealed in the fine print

Abstract

Microelectronic devices are among the most complex structures produced by modern manufacturing technology. A state-of-the-art microprocessor in a personal computer, for example, contains as many as 30 million transistors interconnected by more than one billion discrete electrical junctions (1). To achieve this level of integration, the sizes that define the device components must be small, smaller by several orders of magnitude, for example, than the size of a typical cell found in the human body. The demand for greater performance and capacity in these systems, as famously characterized by Moore's Law (2), has seen the number of individual transistors on a chip increase by a factor of 2 approximately every 18 months. These development cycles ultimately predict that, in 10 years, the advances made in design and processing methodologies will yield architectures for the most sophisticated integrated circuits that contain more than one billion transistors operating at speeds that are at least a factor of 10 faster than the most capable chips available today (International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors Update, http://public.itrs.net/reports.htm). These devices will possess functionalities that certainly would have been unimaginable in 1947 from the vantage point provided by the characteristics of the original point contact transistor of Brattain, Bardeen, and Shockley.

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