Semiconductor Device Group

Every 2 years there is the International Technology Roadmap of Semiconductors (ITRS) which is published to focus the research in semiconductors toward the requirements of future technology generations of products predominantly through the requirements of scaling particular technologies. While the original roadmap (published by the SIA) only dealt with CMOS logic and DRAM, the latest versions including rf, BiCMOS, future emerging devices and health and safety issues among many new topics. A number of different committees are set up to write the different sections of the roadmap and the numbers are all updated every 2 years. The last version was published in December 2005.

I was involved in the Technology Roadmap of European Nanoelectronics looking at post-Moore's law devices and comparing these to CMOS and other technologies. A substantial part of this is also understanding the fundamental limits of computation. When one studies the laws of physics which provide the fundamental limits of computation, you find out that CMOS is pretty good - hence the > $250 M market per annum!!!!