It is not often that the IT market kings talk to the Ⅲ-Ⅴs communities. What makes Intel's Summan Datta so intriguing is that he is, as it were, 'poacher turned gamekeeper' having compound as his first discipline before joining the silicon world. His global take is intriguing, and initially he dealt with aggressive scaling, gate oxides and success with the 90nm logic node covering the introduction of epitaxial SiGe SiGe in the source-drain regions of PMOS transistors to incorporate significant levels of uniaxial com-pressive strain into the Si channel and enhance hole mobility. Continued gate stack scaling requires alternate dielectric with higher dielectric constant and larger physical thickness, and SiO_2 is running out of atoms to scale. Hafnium and zirconium based high-k dielectrics (HfO_2 and ZrO_2) emerge as the most promising candidates for the future, due to their sufficiently large band offsets, thermody-namic stability with Si and high frequency response.
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