View from nanoelectronics


I attended a seminar yesterday by a bigwig at a Large Chip
Manufacturer. He was reviewing (for a college student & professor
audience) what the prospects are for CMOS-replacements. His timeframe
was about 20 years.

He said CMOS research results agree extremely well with a
back-of-the-envelope quantum mechanical and energy estimate of
minimum device sizes and switching times -- IIRC, 1.5nm and 40fs. If
you plot bleeding-edge CMOS results on a graph and draw a line, it
goes very near the calculated minimums.

It seems that many in the semiconductor industry are interested in
spintronics as a successor to CMOS, but the speaker didn't highlight
any practical results. The one figure I remember was the switching
energy: many orders of magnitude (3 or 4, I think) lower than the
17meV estimate for CMOS. Should be faster, too, if only we can make
them and interface with them.

There was an interesting slide about the energy efficiency of
clorophyll: 99.5%, and the energy propagates through the complex
faster than the phonon frequency, which I understand means that the
radiation gets turned into chemical bonds instead of heat.

I asked the speaker about mechanical chemistry & Drexler after the
talk, and he didn't have kind words for those ideas. Apparently,
Large Chip Manufacturer isn't engaged in any research in that
direction.

regards,
dave madden

.

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