The Impact of Dennard's Scaling Theory - IEEE

PEOPLE
approach to IP ownership:
MARCO receives a non-exclusive
royalty-free license to all
foreground IP and reasonable
assurance that any critical background
IP will be licensed for a
reasonable royalty. Giving more
authority to the Provost’s office
to negotiate IP agreements
should help the current situation.
To be competitive globally,
US companies now need
university research results and
the best interests of the country
are served when this happens.
Q. What are the new hot areas that
for the next decade?
A. Electronics and more specifically
ICs have been the principal driver
of the most important economic
event of the past half century, the
information revolution. My view of
the critical reason for the unprecedented
impact of the IC is that it
represents a fusion of the topdown
and bottom-up approaches
to microelectronics that has now
evolved to become nanoelectronics.
Scaling is our common term for
the top-down approach. The bottom-up
approach is epitomized by
the self-assembled single crystal silicon
ingot from which (now
300mm) silicon wafers are sliced,
each yielding several hundred
chips each now containing several
billion transistors.
Of course Moore’s Law will
cease, perhaps in a 10-20 year timeframe.
But my crystal ball suggests
IC manufacturing will be important
for more than double that number
of years. The “vacuum tube-to-transistor
like” breakthrough that is
needed to replace ICs will require a
much more elegant and still
unknown fusion of top-down nanotechnology
in the sub-10nm range
with self-assembled bottom-up nanotechnology
probably rooted in
biochemical science.
Meindl accepted his award with
these comments about technology.
Early 21st century microchips are
The first Editor, James Meindl, then of the US Army Electronics
Command had to be very diligent in his search for both adequate
quantity and quality of papers for his first issues.
From the beginning, a decision was made that a major source of
papers for the JSSC should be the full-length versions of papers first
presented at the ISSCC. However, this aspect took time. Many of the
conference speakers at the ISSCC were not accustomed to publishing
in refereed scholarly publications. After the vigorous refereeing and
selection process for paper presentation at the ISSCC, it was necessary
to work rather carefully with prospective authors to encourage
them for further effort to achieve the results for adequate publication
in a major journal of the IEEE.
Dr. Meindl, as the first Editor made significant contributions, not
only in working with the authors to publish their good contributions
in spite of the press of their dealing on a daily basis with the exploding
technology of solid-state circuits and devices. In addition he set
the tone for the Journal of Solid-State Circuits. In short order he was
able to achieve a high standard of quality and was able to establish
a pattern of publishing major ISSCC presentations as regular title
papers…
From “The Origin of the Journal, the Council and the Conference
of Solid-State Circuits” by Donald O. Pederson, JSSC, April 1984
a marvelous consequence of a
“fusion of the top-down and bottom-up
approaches to nanotechnololgy.”
Top-down nanotechnology
has been used to pattern and
produce multibillion transistor chips
with minimum feature sizes now
beyond 50 nm. Bottom-up nanotechnology
has been used to produce
self-assembled single crystal
ingots of silicon that are sliced to
provide 300 mm diameter wafers for
microchip manufacturing. One
broad prospective is that to advance
beyond the ultimate limits of CMOS
integrated electronics will require an
elegant fusion of top-down and bottom-up
nanotechnology enabled by
future discoveries and inventions in
both physical and biological science
and engineering as profound as the
mid-20th century inventions of the
transistor and the integrated circuit.
Carbon nanotube and graphene
nanoribbon technologies represent
primitive examples of efforts to
achieve such a fusion.
About James Meindl
Early in his career, Dr. Meindl
developed micropower integrated
circuits for portable military equip-
ment at the U.S. Army Electronics
Laboratory in Fort Monmouth, New
Jersey. He then joined Stanford
University in Palo Alto, California,
where he developed low-power
integrated circuits and sensors for a
portable electronic reading aid for
the blind, miniature wireless radio
telemetry systems for biomedical
research, and non-invasive ultrasonic
imaging and blood-flow
measurement systems. Dr. Meindl
was the founding director of the
Integrated Circuits Laboratory and
a founding co-director of the Center
for Integrated Systems at Stanford.
The latter was a model for
university and industry cooperative
research in microelectronics.
From 1986 to 1993, Dr. Meindl
was senior vice president for academic
affairs and provost of Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute in Troy,
New York. In this role he was
responsible for all teaching and
research.
He joined Georgia Tech in 1993
as director of its Microelectronic
Research Center. In 1998, he
became the founding director of
the Interconnect Focus Center,
where he led a team of more than
52 IEEE SSCS NEWSLETTER Winter 2007