The NSF Workshop on "Interdisciplinary Challenges beyond the Scaling Limits of Moore's Law" is organized to explore the scientific issues and technological challenges beyond the scaling limits of Moore's Law with the goal of positioning the U.S. at the forefront of Communications and Computation technologies beyond the physical and conceptual limits of current systems. In accordance with the Moore's Law empirical observation, until recently device integration levels have continued to expand exponentially, and as a result, so has computation power. However, it is now well accepted that current approaches will reach their limits in next 10 years due to a confluence of both fundamental and practical limitations.
Continuing evolution of electronics beyond the scaling limits of Moore's Law is likely to require a broader re-thinking, ranging from novel materials and devices, to circuit and system architectures so that new insights can be employed in computation and knowledge processing technologies. Current technologies already provide examples of energy-efficient systems which have evolved for diverse tasks such as embedded approaches in cell phones or specialized task-specific technologies such as in e-readers. The workshop will explore the overcoming of current barriers by fostering interdisciplinary debate and dialog. The workshop will bring together experts from academia, government, and industry in the fields of life sciences, chemistry, physics, mathematics, materials science, engineering, and computer science to discuss new computational devices and new approaches to computation as well as ways to extend progress in current devices and systems. Some broad questions to be addressed will include the future of terascale devices, strategies to minimize energy utilization, novel materials and devices to overcome the voltage-scaling limitation of existing device technology, and new approaches to reliability based on self-healing and programming. Promising directions are expected to include interdisciplinary merging of architectures, algorithms, materials and devices, and signaling approaches for specific applications. The premise is that a coherent engineering where synergistic approaches draw on diverse insights from electrosciences, materials sciences, physical sciences, mathematics, and computer science, will be necessary. An objective of the workshop is to identify promising insights and directions that project solutions for electronics in the decade of the 2020's.
Invited speakers will highlight insights and challenges from their disciplinary perspectives and will attempt to answer questions posed to them beforehand. The breakout sessions will focus on defining the most important topics for future research. The discussion will also bring out opportunities and necessary changes in education as the complexity of large scale integrated electronics demands greater interdisciplinary knowledge.
The workshop will include presentations by leading practitioners in the fields of semiconductor devices and computer architectures, and by scientists working in the areas of physics, chemistry, mathematics, materials science, molecular electronics and nanoscale systems. The report of this workshop will detail important challenges, fundamental and technological, that are likely to be at the forefront of this field for many years to come. The workshop will be held at the Westin Arlington Gateway Hotel, Arlington, Virginia on August 2-4, 2010. It is expected that the workshop will identify the technological challenges and research opportunities for NSF and the scientific community. The proceedings of the workshop and the list of recommendations will be made available to all participants of the workshop, NSF, other government scientists, industry and policymakers.
The intellectual merit of the workshop is in the vigorous debate and discussion that will be fostered and the identification of fruitful and compelling directions that allow electronics and computation to advance even as electronic device dimensions reach their nanoscale limits. The broader outcome of the workshop is in the identification of the interdisciplinary directions and the related educational approaches that are likely to be most suitable in the undergraduate and graduate curriculum.
Electronics—our computers, cell phones, etc. —are built upon integrated circuits, which in turn are based almost exclusively on silicon transistors. Fundamentally, not much has changed in 50 years except that the number of devices and the resulting functionality have increased exponentially, a scaling based almost entirely on the decrease in size of the individual elements (in this case, MOSFET transistors), not on any fundamentally new device concepts. This exponential increase in functionality based on scaling is termed "Moore’s Law", after Gordon Moore who first described it. It is merely a description of expected progress based on past history, but reliance on that progress has become a cornerstone of the world economy. The progress forecast by "Moore’s Law" is rapidly running up against fundamental laws of physics for silicon transistors, however. These physical realities mean that new concepts in devices must be developed to support future information technology needs. Reliance upon current information technology models cannot be extended past the decade of the 2020s. Similarly, there has not been much change in computer architectures in 50 years. The ability to improve devices without bound, until now, has effectively locked us into computing concepts which may not be sustainable. Nature, for example, provides us with numerous models for information processing based on radically different "architectures" and radically different "devices". New devices and new architectures are thus inexorably intertwined in future information technology. The National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NNIN)-organized Workshop on "Interdisciplinary Challenges beyond the Scaling Limits of Moore's Law" was held Aug. 2?4, 2010 in Arlington, VA. Its purpose was to explore the scientific issues and technological challenges to continued progress in information technology, with the objective of identifying promising insights and directions that project solutions for electronics and computing in the decade of the 2020’s. The issues were probed through 11 invited talks from perceptive and leading thinkers and practitioners followed by open discussions among participants, considering both the broad, long?view perspectives on information technology as well as more specific issues of materials, devices and architectures. This approach allowed the workshop participants to take an in?depth look at the future of information technology within four broad areas: How information is, or could be, processed and the limitations imposed by information theory, Possible life sciences models of information processing that could be more broadly applied to information technology, A discussion of materials and device concepts that hold the promise of a replacement for the field?effect transistor, the basic information processing device, and Information sensors and how these devices can support new IT concepts. The eleven speakers, representing physics, mathematics, chemistry, computer science, materials science, electrical and computer engineering, and related disciplines, were joined by 30 other leading practitioners from these disciplines for the duration of the workshop. In addition, representatives of NSF and other federal agencies attended the talks and discussions. Participants included academic, industrial, and government scientists. The workshop discussion, presentations, and final technical report are available on the NNIN web site at www.nnin.org/nnin_nsf_workshop_2010.html . The outcomes of this workshop supported the creation of a major NSF thrust, "Science and Engineering Beyond Moore’s Law (SEBML)", www.nsf.gov/about/budget/fy2012/pdf/41_fy2012.pdf, and the issuance of a specific major program announcement "Nanotelectronics for 2020 and Beyond (NEB)", www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=503577
