Semiconductor technology—from the drawing board to the circuit board

摘要

Superconductivity and nanotransis-tors aretwo technologies that have emerged as hot topics for the next century. They will be followed by workable, 0.2 μm or less, deep submicron designs, copper interconnect-based application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and newly created acronyms such as "SNS" (superconductive-normal-superconduc-tive) junctions. The next 10 years (conservatively) promises to advance semiconductor technology to a point where high-resolu-tion analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), super high frequency (SHF) complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS), oxygen-enfused, silicon-on-insulator (SIMOX), 1 GB random access memories (RAMs) and RF silicon-germanium (SiGe) transistors will be in mass production. These devices will mainstream such applications as voice recognition, microelectro-mechanical systems (MEMS) and GB data bandwidth systems.