In the Materials Age, What Happens to Economy of Scale?

摘要

The semiconductor industry is looking to a variety of new materials to help boost chip performance and reduce power consumption and leakage. The push to copper and low-k dielectrics is well documented, and there's considerable interest in high-k materials for gate dielectrics and capacitors, metal gates, strained silicon, silicon-on-insulator (SOI), elec-troless CoWP (to cap copper layers) and even more exotic techniques such as germanium-on-insulator(GeOI).