Integrated Systems in the More-Than-Moore Era: Designing Low-Cost Energy-Efficient Systems Using Heterogeneous Components

Moore's law has provided a metronome for semiconductor technology over the past four decades. However, when CMOS transistor feature size and interconnect dimensions approach their fundamental limits, aggressive scaling will no longer play a significant role in performance improvement. How should the semiconductor industry provide new value in each generation of products in such a scenario? While Moore's law driven scaling has traditionally focused on improving computation performance (through faster clock frequencies and recently, more parallelism) and memory capacity, electronic systems of the future will provide value by being multi-functional. We envision that integrated systems of the future will perform diverse functions (in addition to traditional computation, storage and communication) such as real-time sensing, energy harvesting, and on-chip testing, to name a few. Enabling such diverse functionality with high performance, high reliability and a low energy budget in a single system requires a radical shift in the principles of system design and integration. Instead of focusing on improving the performance of traditional digital CMOS circuits or exploring nanotechnologies for Silicon and CMOS replacements, we espouse cohesive design and integration of multiple device technologies and diverse components in a single heterogeneous system that is high-performance, energy-efficient and reliable. The authors describe how heterogeneity in on-chip components can yield a high overall efficiency that goes beyond of what Moore's Law promises to provide.