The future of nanoelectronics: New materials, architectures and devices

Abstract

Technological breakthroughs have led to enormous improvements in performance, power, functionality and cost of computing devices and have thus enabled 50 years of Moore's law. Cost per function has decreased several thousand fold, while system performance and reliability have been improved dramatically. Today conventional silicon transistor scaling is approaching fundamental physical limits. For example, the increasing power dissipation on the chip level is one of the key challenges. Rising leakage currents and the increasing difficulty to further reduce the supply voltage have impacted the passive and active power dissipation, limiting the overall performance. Therefore a key attribute of any new device that may be considered for replacing the conventional field-effect transistor (FET) is reduced power dissipation. In that respect new strategies, including the use of novel materials, innovative device architectures and device concepts need to be explored and assessed.