End of semiconductor roadmap ahead

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By Mitchell Zimmer
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Eli Yablonovitch is the founding experimentalist in photonic band gap materials.
 
 
Eli Yablonovitch
 
 
The professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley is known as the first person to design artificial crystal structures that manipulate light in a special and promising way.
 
The new materials treat photons in a manner comparable to that of semiconductors controlling electrical signals through transistors. There is even a crystal named after him called yablonovite. These types of photonic crystals promise to revolutionize the information and telecommunications industries.
 
But he didn’t come to The University of Western Ontario to talk about that.
 
Yablonovitch also had a hand in creating Luxtera, a company that has introduced an optoelectronic integrated cable capable of carrying data at rates up to 40 gigabytes per second.
 
But he didn’t come to Western to talk about that either.
 
As the 2008 Western Institute for Nanomaterials Science Distinguished Lecturer, Yablonovitch gave a talk called "The End of the Semiconducting Roadmap: The Collision of Physics, Economics and Sociology."
 
He provided a look back at the growth, refinement and impacts of integrated circuits via silicon technology, and offered predictions about where the technology is going.
 
Yablonovitch often put the historical developments of semiconductors in context with his own life. As a boy in the 1960s he would tinker with electronics, in one particular high school project he needed a few transistors. The problem was that the devices would cost nearly $10 each. One day, he found a mail order distributor selling the components he needed for $2.50 each.
 
Today, it is possible for a single chip to contain over one billion transistors, each costing just a few millionths of a cent. And over that time period the number of transistors shipped went from a few billion in the late ’60s to billions times billions in the present day.
 
These observations are the real-world consequences of Moore’s Law, set out by Intel Corporation co-founder Gordon Moore in 1975.
 
Once new technology has laid the foundation, other industries are built on top manufacturing devices, programs and services running into trillions of dollars per year.
 
As wondrous as these developments are, “when the industry becomes too successful, it becomes too efficient and what happens to industries like that is that they eventually shrink. I think of the agricultural industry. It used to be that in North America, 100 years ago, half of all effort was in farming and then the farming got to be very efficient and now only one per cent of the effort is in farming.”
 
The only way to prevent this from happening with semiconductors is “you need to come up with new things, new functions, new unrecognized needs that people are willing to pay for. Once you’ve made the laptop too cheap, then you have to have something beyond that.”
 
Another challenge exists on the lower size limit that can be reached with semiconductors.
 
The industry is already testing prototype transistors in the 9 nm (that’s 9 billionths of a metre) range, so devices will operate at the molecular level. This is the end of the roadmap predicted by Moore’s Law.
 
Nevertheless, technologies are coming to fruition, such as the growing popularity of wireless and multicore CPUs. Yablonovitch predicted the rise of Radio Frequency ID chips, the shrinking of laptops to the size of cell phones, the replacement of hard disks with flash technology, refinement of speech recognition eliminate the need for keyboards, and developing intelligent search engines. 

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