Semiconductor Research Corporation: Taking Moore's Law Into the Next Century

F ar from Silicon Valley, amid the green and rolling hills of North Carolina, is an organization that propels the multibillion dollar semiconductor industry. It's one of the few organizations to get fierce competitors like Intel, Motorola, Texas Instruments, and IBM to the same table, let alone cooperate. These companies and many others contribute fees of about $37 million annually to fund future research to keep the engines of semiconductor production churning. In short, the Semiconductor Research Corp. is bent on taking Moore's law into the next century. The SRC was formed in 1982 by the Semiconductor Industry Association with the unique charter of coordinating academic research to meet industry's needs. Its research aims at technology that will support Moore's law in the next five to eight years. SRC pools funds from its 30 member companies to sponsor " precom-petitive " research and makes that research available to all members. SRC is unusual for an industry consortium in the depth to which it manages research projects (see the " Managing R&D " sidebar). Without SRC, the US semiconductor industry would have a much less coordinated strategy for initiating and managing precom-petitive R&D. Together with its sister organization, Sematech, SRC helps chart and promote the continued progress of the semiconductor industry. (See the " Spectrum of Semiconductor Research " sidebar.) Their main guide for doing so is the National Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors. Moore's law posits that microprocessor performance (as defined by the number of transistors on a chip) will double every 18 months—a 58 percent compounded annual growth rate. 1 Historically, the semiconductor industry has kept pace by • continuously shrinking feature size to increase the number of transistors on a chip, and thus • increasing the speed of the circuits. 1 To ensure that the industry focuses on the technical challenges to continued productivity, the SIA publishes its biannual Roadmap. This document analyzes industry progress in process and design technologies, charting research directions necessary to meet specific goals. Overall, this Roadmap calls for the exponential scaling of feature sizes shown in Table 1. 1,2 In developing the 2012 targets, the SIA constrains projections so interim targets are believed to be attainable. These targets assume that technology barriers will be overcome in a timely manner. Beyond 2006, physical barriers ultimately include atomic properties that will come to the fore with aggressive device shrinkage, as well as capacitance, crosstalk, soft errors, …