Submicron CMOS Challenge Training Course

After decades of continuous improvement you would be forgiven if you thought that faster, better cheaper ICs would go on forever. The truth is that trying to sustain historic rates of IC improvements is running into increasingly difficult physics, materials and economic challenges. The industry is making unprecedented changes in materials, technologies, devices and industry structure in an attempt to sustain Moore’s Law. Users and developers of ICs, along with government and investors, need to be understand these changes and how they are going to be impacted.

This introductory course presents an overview of the challenges, current and potential solutions, industry impact and possible future scenarios. An outline is presented below. It is aimed at engineers, scientists, managers, technical salesmen and technical investors. The material is presented in an easy-to-understand way that focuses on developing the intuitive, big picture understanding that is most important to working people.

Module Topics (Narration Time in Minutes)

1.Introduction (34)

2.IC Power and Performance (29)

3.Real World Scaling (42)

4.Leakage Currents I: Subthreshold (33)

5.Leakage Currents II: Short Channel (11)

6.Leakage Current III. Gate Tunneling (20)

7.Drive Current Reduction (23)

8.Parasitics (18)

9.Processing I: Lithography (32)

11. New Materials I: SOI & Strained Silicon (47)

12. New Materials II: High k & Metal Gate (38)

13. New Materials III: Copper (22)

14. New Materials IV: Low k (23)

15. New Devices (43)

16. Design Challenges (35)

17. Reliability Challenges (47)

18. Economics & Industry Impact (56)

19. Future Scenarios of Moore’s Law (41)