At IEDM 2014, December, San Francisco

• Karim Arabi, Ph.D. – vice president, engineering, Qualcomm,
• Michael Guillorn, Ph.D. – research staff member, IBM,
• Witek Maszara, Ph.D. – distinguished member of technical staff, GLOBALFOUNDRIES,
• Aaron Thean, Ph.D. – vice president, logic process technologies, imec, and
• Satheesh Kuppurao, Ph.D. – vice president, front end products group, Applied Materials.

Arabi said that from the design perspective the overarching concern is to keep “innovating at the edge” of instantaneous and mobile processing. At the transistor level, the 10nm node process will be similar to that at the 14nm node, though perhaps with alternate channels. The 7nm node will be an inflection point with more innovation needed such as gate-all-around (GAA) nanowires in a horizontal array. By the 5nm node there’s no way to avoid tunnel FETs and III-V channels and possibly vertical nanowires, though self-heating issues could become very challenging. There’s no shortage of good ideas in the front end and lots of optimism that we’ll be able to make the transistors somehow, but the situation in the backend of on-chip metal interconnect is looking like it could become a bottleneck.

more at: http://semimd.com/blog/tag/globalfoundries/