Silicon technology-emerging trends from a system application perspective

Silicon technology development is at a crossroad, in spite of its exponential rate of progress for more than thirty years. CMOS will remain the backbone of all digital functions, but is reaching its scaling limits. In spite of digital CMOS reaching its limits, progress in silicon technology development will not slow down because system performance is not governed by CMOS logic alone. In this paper, we examine several emerging silicon technology trends from a system perspective. These trends include overcoming the memory bottleneck, enhancing NVRAM for data storage, development of nonvolatile RAM, and improving mixed-signal technology.