There is plenty of room at the silicon

Summary form only given. As the silicon technology is scaled down to sub. 10nm and most advanced chips are fabricated mostly in the industry, silicon related researches draw less attention from young researchers. Rather, academia researches on electronics are shifted to exploring new materials such as graphene, 2D metal oxide and carbon nanotube. However, there is plenty of room at the Silicon. The `plenty of room' implies more than the `more than Moore' paradigm, where the silicon chip technology is expanded to applications such as photonics, bio sensing, MEMS, etc. Rather, the `plenty of room' paradigm implies that the operational principles of silicon devices are applied (rather than simple integration) to expanding the capability of the `more than Moore' and even `beyond the Moore' paradigm. As examples of the new paradigm, we present three examples developed at Seoul National University. Firstly, the electron tunneling phenomenon from silicon to gate through gate insulator is used as means of injecting electrons to water solution(water solution is gate in this case). In this way, well controlled electrons in terms of numbers and energies can be supplied to water to understand and control the surface chemistry at the water-solid interface [1]. Secondly, well known electronic feedback taken place in the bipolar transistor under the BVceo condition is applied to the UVLED based spectroscopy. With an electron detouring from the PD(Photo detector diode) to the photo generation at the PD junction by way of LED, the `bipolar like snap back' in the current voltage characteristics of the PD can be obtained by the impact ionization feedback. As the BVceo is critically sensitive to the transistor α, the PD snap back is sensitive to the detouring path, where the light from LED is absorbed by the molecules before arriving at the PD junction. Using the system, orders of magnitude enhancement in the sensitivity has been obtained for the detection of the (contaminating) molecules in the water. In the third example, the pulse technique is applied between the electrical channel and water solution to alleviate the signal degradation from the bio molecules due to the charge screening effect, which is similar to the technique used in the CCD(Charge Coupled Device) to transfer the electrons from the optical excitation[2]. We are applying the pulse technique to sensing the DNA as the biomarker of the Denge virus in collaboration with the IMEN(Institute of Microengineering and Nanoelectronics of Malaysia. With the experiences, we propose that the `plenty of room at the silicon' paradigm to maximally utilize the benefit of the silicon technology.