Economic Analysis of NIST's Low-k Materials Characterization Research. Planning Report 08-2. Final Report

摘要

Throughout the 1980s, the semiconductor industry worked to increase the speed and performance of their integrated circuits (IC) and microprocessors by squeezing more and more transistors into a single device. This has been achieved by scaling down the physical dimensions of the transistor elements as well as the distance between them. Today, over one billion transistors are integrated into a single microprocessor. As the size of transistor components and the distances between them are reduced, an increasingly smaller, densely packed, and highly complex network of conducting wires--referred to as the interconnect structure--is also required.