Introduction to functionality-enhanced devices

For more than four decades, the semiconductor industry answered the demand for an increasingly higher level of integration and performance by following Moore's law [1], which predicts that the number of transistors and thus the complexity of circuits that can be integrated economically doubles every 18-24 months. Moore's law led us today to manufactured devices with dimensions of few tens of nanometers [2-5]. However, while the reduction of device dimensions increases the computing density, i.e., the maximal possible number of computations per unit area and time, the research community commonly admits that Moore's law is at its twilight and that innovations are required toward a more sustainable route [6-8].