The memory industry has already turned to 3D architectures to ease miniaturization pressure and boost the capacity of NAND Flash. But since then, 3D concepts have gained momentum. That report predicted that the physical gate length of transistors-an indicator of how far current must travel in the device-and other key logic chip dimensions would continue to shrink until at least 2028. Transistor miniaturization was still a part of the long-term forecast as recently as 2014, when the penultimate ITRS report was released. The new IEEE roadmap-the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems-will also take this approach, but it will add computer architecture to the mix, allowing for “a comprehensive, end-to-end view of the computing ecosystem, including devices, components, systems, architecture, and software,” according to a recent press release. Instead, it takes a more top-down approach, focusing on the applications that now drive chip design, such as data centers, the Internet of Things, and mobile gadgets. The name reflects the idea that improvements in computing are no longer driven from the bottom-up, by tinier switches and denser or faster memories. This final ITRS report is titled ITRS 2.0. “Once upon a time,” Gargini says, “the semiconductor companies decided what the semiconductor features were supposed to be. What’s more, he says, chip buyers and designers-companies such as Apple, Google, and Qualcomm-are increasingly dictating the requirements for future chip generations. Semiconductor companies that no longer make leading-edge chips in house rely on the foundries that make their chips to provide advanced technologies. “The industry has changed,” agrees Paolo Gargini, chair of the ITRS, but he highlights other shifts. “It’s sort of like everything’s fun and games when you start off at the beginning of the football season, but by the time you get down to the playoffs it’s pretty rough.” “They don’t want to sit in a room and talk about what their needs are,” Hutcheson says. What’s more, they’re fiercely competitive. These companies have their own roadmaps and can communicate directly to their equipment and materials suppliers, Hutcheson says. (Until recently, IBM was also part of that cohort, but its chip fabrication plants were sold to GlobalFoundries.) Today, there are just four: Intel, TSMC, Samsung, and GlobalFoundries. By Hutcheson’s count, 19 companies were developing and manufacturing logic chips with leading-edge transistors in 2001. Suppliers had a hard time identifying what the semiconductor companies needed, he says, and it made sense for chip companies to collectively set priorities to make the most of limited R&D funding.īut the difficulty and expense associated with maintaining the leading edge of Moore’s Law has since resulted in significant consolidation. ![]() semiconductor companies had reason to cooperate and identify common needs in the early 1990’s, at the outset of the roadmapping effort that eventually led to the ITRS’s creation in 1998. But “this is a major disruption, or earthquake, in the industry,” says analyst Dan Hutcheson, of the firm VLSI Research. These roadmapping shifts may seem like trivial administrative changes. Other ITRS participants are expected to continue on with a new roadmapping effort under a new name, which will be conducted as part of an IEEE initiative called Rebooting Computing. trade group that represents the interests of IBM, Intel, and other companies in Washington and a key ITRS sponsor-will do its own work, in collaboration with another industry group, the Semiconductor Research Corporation, to identify research priorities for government- and industry-sponsored programs. ![]() Compounding the drama is the fact that this is the last ITRS roadmap, the end to a more-than-20-year-old coordinated planning effort that began in the United States and was then expanded to include the rest of the world.Ĭiting waning industry participation and an interest in pursuing other initiatives, the Semiconductor Industry Association-a U.S. Instead, chip manufacturers will turn to other means of boosting density, namely turning the transistor from a horizontal to a vertical geometry and building multiple layers of circuitry, one on top of another.įor some, this change will likely be interpreted as another death knell for Moore’s Law, the repeated doubling of transistor densities that has given us the extraordinarily capable computers we have today. That is the prediction of the 2015 International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, which was officially released earlier this month.Īfter 2021, the report forecasts, it will no longer be economically desirable for companies to continue to shrink the dimensions of transistors in microprocessors. After more than 50 years of miniaturization, the transistor could stop shrinking in just five years.
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