The Semiconductor Industry has successfully continued to prosper for over 40 years relying on the planar CMOS process as its backbone after overcoming a multitude of challenges. Scaling has provided all along a path to cheaper, better and faster integrated circuits. In the past 10 years the CMOS process has introduced revolutionary new processes and structures like Strained Silicon, High-K/Metal Gate and Multigate transistors to overcome the fundamental limiting blocks reached by the silicon gate process. Fueled by research of the past decade, new and exciting materials and novel structures are planned to be introduced in CMOS technology in the next 10 years. Furthermore, the industry is on its way to another wafer size conversion and presently equipment capable of processing wafers of 450mm in diameter is under development.
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