Roadmap for Semiconductors

F or the past 40 years, the semiconductor industry has distinguished itself by the rapid pace of improvement in its products. This growth has resulted principally from the industry’s ability to decrease exponentially the minimum feature sizes it uses to fabricate integrated circuits, commonly referred to as Moore’s law. The most significant trend for society is the decreasing cost per function, which has led to significant improvements in productivity and quality of life through proliferation of computers, electronic communication, and consumer electronics. Over the past two decades, the phenomenal increase in research and development investments has motivated industry collaboration and spawned many partnerships, consortia, and other cooperative ventures. The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) is an especially successful worldwide cooperation that presents an industry-wide consensus on the “best current estimate” of its R&D needs out to a 15-year horizon. As such, the Roadmap provides a guide to the efforts of companies, research organizations, and governments to improve the quality of R&D investment decisions made at all levels, and it has helped channel efforts to areas that truly need research breakthroughs. Since its inception in 1992 as the National Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (NTRS), the Roadmap’s basic premise has been that scaling of microelectronics would continue to reduce the cost per function by 25 percent and promote market growth for integrated circuits by 15 percent annually. Thus, the Roadmap is put together in the spirit of a challenge: What technical capabilities does the industry need to develop to continue to follow Moore’s law? The semiconductor industry is increasingly sharing its research efforts via mechanisms such as consortia and collaborations with suppliers in a precompetitive environment. The ITRS identifies the principal technology needs to guide this shared research. It does this in two ways: by showing the targets that technology solutions currently under development need to meet and by indicating where there are no “known solutions” (of reasonable confidence) to continued scaling in some aspects of semiconductor technology. Because they clearly warn where historical progress trends might end if the industry doesn’t achieve some real breakthroughs in the future, these latter indicators highlight serious and exciting challenges. As the “Overall Roadmap Process and Structure” sidebar indicates, the 2001 Roadmap is notable because it was developed with truly international representation. The contributions outlined here represent but a small portion of this immense undertaking over the past two years. The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) is a collaborative effort within the semiconductor industry to confront the challenges implicit in Moore’s law. Representatives of the International Technology Working Groups for Design and Test outline some of the contributions made by 839 international experts as they sought to reach an industry-wide consensus on its R&D needs out to a 15-year horizon.