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Colloquium | Materials Science

Semiconductor Technology - the Path Forward for the Coming Decades

Microelectronics Colloquium Series

Abstract: The semiconductor industry has been extremely successful in integrating discrete components into billion-transistor chips. Future electronic systems will continue to rely on, and increasingly benefit from, the advances in semiconductor technology as they have had for more than five decades. 21st century applications are going to be data-centric. Data analytics, machine learning, and AI applications are going to dominate, from data center to mobile and IoT, from collecting and processing, to curating the data to derive information.

With this in mind, this presentation will look at how the performance of those specialized architectures can be improved at the system level by advances of the underlying device and process technologies. An analysis of the technology trend for GPU and accelerators leads to a key observation: in the coming decades, three dimensional integration is one of the major technology directions, and we must go beyond a single chip from a wafer and focus on integrating chips into systems. I will give an overview of the new materials and device technologies that may need to be developed to realize this vision.