Integrated circuit development three major technical breakthroughs

Along the "Moore's Law", integrated circuit technology has gone through more than 50 years of history. Today's production technology is close to 22nm, and if it continues to scale down, the 2011 ITRS predicts that DRAM's minimum processing bandwidth will reach 8nm in 2024, entering quantum physics and mesoscopic physics Category, then will face two restrictions.

First, the micro-scale constraints

Due to the mesoscopic scale material containing a certain amount of particles on the one hand, it can not be solved by the Schrödinger equation only, and the number of particles is negligible. (According to the traditional measurement method, the radius of the silicon atom is 110pm, The calculated radius of the silicon atom is 111pm), which makes the further development of integrated circuit technology encounter many physical obstacles such as Fermi pinning, coulomb blocking, quantum tunneling, impurity fluctuation, spin transport, etc. Mesoscopic physics and quantum-based processing methods to solve.

Second, the power limit

Intel thinks the power density of their Pentium chips has been comparable to electric furnaces. Due to the high temperature of Integrated Circuits, high frequency performance, leakage and reliability of the deterioration have a huge impact, if any of its development, the integrated circuit heat to the nuclear reactors, rocket nozzles and even the sun's surface power density development, it is clear that this is impossible to be Accepted fact. For the growing heat dissipation, water-cooling devices are either used to solve the heat dissipation problem, but this is contrary to the trend of miniaturization, light weight and mobility of electronic devices; or the development of low-power and even very low-power integrated circuits To solve the problem of rising power consumption of integrated circuits.

How to break through the above limitations of integrated circuits and meet the needs of energy-saving society, there are currently three technical ways to proceed:

First, to continue Moore's Law, that is, continue to take the road of scaling down, the digital content integrated in a single chip, a chip system, but after 16 / 14nm large production process is not yet clear, is also being explored;

The second is beyond the mole, that is, the method of system packaging to non-digital content, such as analog circuits, radio frequency circuits, high voltage and power circuits, sensors and even biochips all integrated together to form a more functional, better performance and higher value Electronic system

Third, a new principle is adopted, that is, a new device structure is created by adopting a bottom-up approach or adopting new materials, such as quantum devices (single electron devices, spin devices, magnetic flux devices, etc.) and self-assembled atom and molecule devices (Graphene, carbon nanotubes, nanowires, etc.), it is also possible to find new ways to establish a new form of information science and technology and its industries with new discoveries and technological breakthroughs in physics, mathematics, chemistry and biology. Expected IC technology In the 2130s, the above technical approach will produce a revolutionary breakthrough in the spark of mutual collision.