The End Of The Innovation Road for CMOS

Elledan writes "According to this EE Times article, CMOS technology (also used to create CPUs with) is getting near the moment when we will no longer be able to create smaller structures with it. With the date for this moment set around 2012 and with no replacement technology in sight, this issue might become a real problem in the near future, as the article explains."

Comments

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[clark625]

I work in research at a university, and my PhD project is going to help solve this problem (and others) long before 2012. I can't get into specifics because of disclosure issues. But, understand that already a HUGE amount of work has been done behind the scenes and most other researchers don't yet know of what's to come.

CMOS isn't going to die. Turns out that we're not limited in the horizontal direction like everyone predicted years ago (remember how lithography was always the big problem?). Instead, it's the vertical direction. Our gates are having to get too thin. SiO2 just doesn't work well with 10A thick layers because of trapped charge and whatnot. Also we can't properly control doping at very shallow levels.

But all that doesn't matter. Strained-Si technology is where it's going. If you're interested, check out AmberWave. It turns out that we can increase the mobility of holes and electrons--so even older .18um fabs could easily be refitted with strained Si material and compete with the .13um fabs. Actually, it's even better than that--the increases in mobility have been up to 8 times over that of Si.

No, CMOS isn't going to die. It's going to change and morph. Just like it has in the past. We don't need a revolution like many engineers are claiming--we simply need evolution. Strained Si is an evolution that will make for revolutions later. Current fabs can just swap out their current Si wafers and get strained Si ones--most everything else in the fab stays the same. Talk about a huge cost savings to boot (no need to rebuild a new fab for billions).