CHIPS 2020

We select eight silicon chip technologies, which play significant roles in the decade 2010–2020 and beyond for the development of high-performance, low-energy chips. In the spirit of the 25-years rule, all of these technologies have been demonstrated, and some, in fact, are very mature and yet are worth to be revisited at the nano-scale.
The bipolar transistor remains superior in transconductance and bandwidth, and the complementary cross-coupled nano-pair can become the best ultra-low-energy signal-regenerator.
MOS and CMOS circuits continue to be the most effective solutions for giant- scale integration in a silicon-on-insulator technology. However, the end of progress with just scaling down transistor dimensions is near, and this is not a matter of technology capability, but one of atomic variance in 10 nm transistors. Once only ~6 doping atoms are responsible for their threshold and voltage gain, 95% of these transistors would have between 1 and 9 such atoms. Their threshold would vary more than their supply voltage. We show that, at these dimensions, not a transistor, but the cross-coupled pair of CMOS inverters is the elementary and necessary signal regenerator at the heart of ultra-low-voltage differential logic.
This assembly of four transistors is the perfect target for 3D integration at the transistor-level on-chip, and selective Si epitaxy is shown as an exemplary solution, including self-assembly eliminating certain lithography steps. This optimized 4T building block enables a 6T SRAM memory cell scalable to a 2020 density competitive with a DRAM cell, which cannot be scaled because of capacitor size and transistor leakage.
The 4T block is also the key accelerator in the differential logic HIPERLOGIC, exemplified by an n-bit by n-bit multiplier, which also illustrates the importance of new circuit architectures. DIGILOG, a most-significant-bit-first multiplier, has a complexity O(3n) versus O(n²/2) in commonly used Booth multipliers. With HIPERLOGIC, a 16 x 16 bit multiplier is projected to require only 1fJ per multiplication in 2020, about 1,000-times less than the status in 2010 and 10-times less than a synapse in the human brain. Therefore, processing has the potential to become 1,000-times more energy efficient within a decade.
The 3D integration of chips has become another key contributor to improve the overall energy efficiency of systems-of-chips incorporating sensing, transceiving, and computing.