On entering a new era of product-driven technology
02/01/2006
The international community expects a continuation of IC dimension scaling beyond the 22nm technology generation, with a technology node cycle of two to three years. Together with its industrial partners, IMEC will continue to develop process steps, technology modules, IP blocks, and other requirements for the technologies that are needed to deliver next-generation electronic devices and applications. However, the push to get to ever smaller, faster, cheaper, and more complex ICs comes at the expense of a high investment that has opened the door to a new era of product-driven technology nodes. The market and the economy, not technology, now determine the timing of introducing the next generation.
The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) started from the assumption that there will be a sufficient number of new products that need the aggressively scaled technologies. There is indeed a continuous demand for versatile products such as microprocessors, microcontrollers, and memories that all use ITRS-dominated technologies. Additionally, field-programmable gate array (FPGA) products that combine microprocessors, logic, memory, buses, etc., on the same platform need the most advanced technologies to reach the required high densities. However, the development of these expensive products requires high-volume production to stay economically viable. If the demand for these products becomes less than expected, it can slow down the Roadmap.
In this era, the question of which technologies will drive the semiconductor industry of tomorrow no longer holds. Today, the market and/or the application determine which technologies integrate with customers’ roadmaps and need further development. Wireless portable devices need multimedia platforms, radio, displays, and all related process and system technologies. The developers of portable computers look at the integration ability of various complex processors and multiple-processor systems in order to enable more performance for the same power consumption.
System and design technologies, even packaging technologies, are of growing importance if companies want to maintain product differentiation. This is mainly caused by the growing complexity of tomorrow’s products. The main differentiator for most companies is no longer in process technologies, but in systems, architecture design, applications, and services. For the products of the future, scientists face a lot of challenges in different technologies, but from a process-technological point of view, no insurmountable bottlenecks are defined or envisioned. We have not yet reached the physical limits of scaling.
Aside from these types of products, microelectronics is increasingly finding its way into diverse fields such as health, food preparation, agricultural, logistics, industrial applications, and myriad other areas. The main challenge here is to bring together various technologies from diverse disciplines on one platform. We do not expect this emerging field to be driven by scaling. Novel market applications and technology platforms with multipurpose applications will be developed, with the market as the main driver, but most likely they will not need the most expensive technologies.
R&D will always be crucial to help the industry advance to the next level of technology. The question is who will carry out R&D and where. Many companies have cut back their R&D efforts and, to have sufficient ROI, have increasingly turned to collaborative and shared R&D. This works well, provided that collaboration is reserved for the development of generic and platform technologies. For these, joint R&D provides the right resources to obtain relatively fast solutions at reduced cost. Of course, the outcome of the collaboration will be shared, even with competitors. Therefore, individual companies must put efforts into developing proprietary technologies that are needed to keep their competitiveness and maintain product differentiation, their guarantee of success in an increasingly competitive environment.
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For more information, contact Ludo Deferm, VP, Business Development, IMEC, Kapeldreef 75, B-3001 Leuven, Belgium; ph 32/16-281-880, fax 32/16-281-637, e-mail [email protected].