Future Prospects for Moore's Law
Abstract
Moore's law was the first widely-recognized indicator of progress in integrated circuit technology. It fits into a broader set of metrics that are used to characterize the detailed state of semiconductor technology today and is often used loosely as a surrogate for most of them. Some of these are the logic-gate/memory-bit-level metrics of cost, operating speed, active power, and standby power. For more than four decades, all of these have been improved at exponential pace principally by scaling the feature sizes of the device structures within ICs. Today, we label successive ^0.7x overall scaling milestones as semiconductor technology nodes. The semiconductor industry's official definition, progress tracking, and future projections for IC technology nodes are documented in the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS), which is updated annually. The updates are based on a consensus-building process conducted by Technology Working Groups with approximately 1,000 international participants from industry (chipmakers and their suppliers), academia, and government. The principal purpose of the ITRS is to highlight future research and development needs in support of continued IC progress. It accomplishes this primarily by creating a (rolling 15-year-horizon) strawman extrapolation of recent trends for hundreds of IC technology parameters and colorcoding them in terms of estimated risk of solution based on the best-guess level of R&D effort. Examples of the technology parameter projections, risk assessments, potential solutions, and other highlights of the 2003 ITRS are presented.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 30, 2004
- Accession Number
- ADA433448
Entities
People
- Robert R. Doering
Organizations
- Texas Instruments