Direction of silicon technology from past to future

Recently, information technology (IT) such as Internet, i-mode, cellular phones, and car navigation has spread very rapidly all over the world. It is expected to dramatically raise the efficiency of our society and greatly improve the quality of life. It should be noted that the progress of IT is entirely owed to that of semiconductor technology, especially silicon LSIs. Silicon LSIs provide high speed/frequency operation of a tremendous number of functions with low cost, low power, small size, small weight, and high reliability. In the last 30 years, MOSFET gate length has reduced by 100 times, DRAM density has increased 500,000 times, and MPU clock frequency has increased 2,500 times. Without such marvellous progress in LSI technologies, current successes in information technology would not be realized at all. In this paper, silicon technology from past to future is reviewed for advanced CMOS LSIs.