In 1947 the first transistor was developed at Bell labs. That
was the foundation of solid state electronics as this invention expanded the possibilities
in the design of analog circuits and some logic functions which were not
possible with bipolar diode. A few years later Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce
(Co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel) built upon the foundation
placed by Bell labs. The two researchers worked independently and fabricated
integrated circuits with a couple of transistors. These bulky circuits proved
the concept of integration of multiple devices on a single piece of silicon.
Semiconductor industry took the invention seriously and worked on the concept
to realize integration of devices at Small scale (SS), Medium scale (MS), Large
scale (LS), Very large scale (VLS) and ultra large scale (ULS) progressively
with evolving technology and fabrication techniques. The evolution took decades
of learning and huge knowledge base of semiconductor physics and material
science. The rate of evolution observed in semiconductor technology is even
higher than the predictions under “Moore’s Law” by Gordon Moore (Chairman of
Intel). Now we are at the stage where Ultra large scale integration has enabled
us to fabricate millions of transistor on a single chip. The results of ULSI
are System on Chip (SoC), Network on Chips (NoC) and Stock IC’s. Now we are
heading toward a minimum feature size of 5 nano-meter (nm), which results in a
channel length of a few atoms.
What is the future of semiconductor industry below 5-nm?
What NEXT?
Author - Krishan verma
(Research Associate at SiliconMentor)
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| transistor technology |
