What Does the Future Hold for the Microelectronics Industry?

Moore’s Law has guided the digital revolution for the past 40 years. For decades, the microelectronics industry focused on miniaturization and increasing speed. However, the time has come for the industry to reinvent its approach to electronics and find itself a new set of goals.

 

It had to happen sooner or later. Miniaturization has hit concrete barriers in phsyics. As a result, innovation to increase the performance of integrated circuits must now come from new materials and architectures. Several paths are being explored by Grenoble INP laboratories, including new concepts for transistor and circuit architectures or logic elements.

Grenoble INP is also participating in several European projects to develop memory solutions. For example, the Spintec laboratory is collaborating on the European SPOT project and working to develop innovative spintronics-based memory.

Other laboratories are exploring alternatives to silicon, which has reached its limit. Many materials are being considered, but for the moment none have evolved past the phase of a lab prototype. Materials currently being explored include germanium, graphite, other 2D materials such as Transition Metal Dichalcogenide, SiC and carbon nanotubes.

While we wait for new innovations to emerge from laboratories, scientists are also working to improve the impact and sustainability of current technology. “For example, we’re working on finding alternatives for rare or toxic materials. We’re also looking to reduce energy consumption for components and circuits, which is a major factor for IoT applications.” explains Francis Balestra, coordinator of the European NEREID project.

Grenoble INP has a strong history with low-energy integrated circuits, which were first developed in one of its laboratories in the 80s. In combination with Fully Depleted Silicon on Insulator technology (FD-SOI) and Fully Inverted components, these technologies enable the production of low-consumption, high-performing circuits. In particular, they lower leakage rates which enables further integration. FD-SOI technology is also compatible with current design and production processes. As this technology has reached maturity, it continues to be deployed as part of European projects such as the ECSEL project, of which Grenoble INP is a partner.
 
 

Current CMOS technology, which enables calculation and memory, is not sufficient to further microelectronics development. In response, the idea is to develop “More than Moore” by reversing the approach and starting from concrete needs in order to find solutions.

“The fields of energy, transportation, health, security, IoT, mobile applications and industrial production all have growing needs for nanoelectronics. General technology and designs can be used, but each industry has increasingly specific requirements for a wide array of applications.”

The idea is to add functions to a circuit using components such as sensors, switches, radio communications, power electronics, energy recuperation, imaging, lighting, etc. This enables the creation of micro-nanosystems capable of accomplishing complex tasks.

Chips can also be improved thanks to the use of 3D integration which superimposes several chips in order to create more powerful components with new functionalities all the while maintain an almost identical size. Other promising areas include the integration of heterogeneous chip functionalities using various technologies and materials.

By associating “more Moore” and “more than Moore”, CMOS technology has many opportunities to grow. However, at one point or another, the technology will still hit physical and economic barriers. As a result, the sector’s industrial and international scientific communities have been working to explore new options that go beyond CMOS technology and Moore’s Law. By introducing new concepts that do not rely on the traditional CMOS transistors and silicon-based microelectronics, it should be possible to develop less expensive options. Several possibilities includes spintronics, nanoelectromechanical structures, molecular electronics and quantum electronics.

 

Grenoble’s laboratories include seven labs that are partnered with Grenoble INP. They all have a combination of experimental and theoretical skills that cover the entire field of research from materials to processes, components, circuits and systems. These skills enable them to contribute to numerous fields of activity in microelectronics such as logics, telecoms, physics measurements, biology, healthcare and energy.