International Roadmap for Devices and Systems (IRDS™) 2021 Edition
2021 IRDS Executive Documents
Executive Summary
The events of 2020 and 2021 were very dramatic as the whole world was overwhelmed by the first pandemic in 100 years. However, the need to remotely communicate, acquire goods, handling banking and business transactions accelerated several aspects of the electronics industry. It would have probably taken more than five years under normal conditions to more organically proliferate so many technologies. In addition, new customers that had not expected to even become acquainted with some of these technologies (e.g., notebooks, Zoom communications, on-line purchasing, etc.) were compelled to become familiar with these new technologies. This Executive Summary will highlight the progress made in 2021 and forecast some of the trends in 2021.
2021 IRDS International Focus Teams (IFTs) Roadmap Reports
Systems & Architectures
The Systems and Architectures section of the roadmap serves as a bridge between application benchmarks and component technologies. The systems analyzed in this section cover a broad range of applications of computing, electronics, and photonics. By studying each of these systems in detail, we can identify requirements for the semiconductor and photonics technologies that make these systems and applications possible. This section considers four different types of systems, as follows:
1. Internet-of-things edge (IoTe) devices provide sensing/actuation, computation, security, storage, and wireless communication. They are connected to physical systems and operate in wireless networks to gather, analyze, and react to events in the physical world.
2. Cyber-physical systems (CPS) provide real-time control for physical plants. Vehicles and industrial systems are examples of CPS.
3. Mobile devices such as smartphones provide communication, interactive computation, storage, and security. For many people, smartphones provide their primary or only computing system.
4. Cloud systems power data centers to perform transactions, provide multimedia, and analyze data. Cloud systems represent a trend towards a synthesis of design principles and methodologies taken from traditional enterprise, high performance scientific, and web native compute. Increasingly these systems are utilizing artificial intelligence to continue to improve operational efficiency, becoming CPS in their own right.
Increasingly, these four categories of systems are being combined into entire edge to cloud large scale intelligent social infrastructure systems of complex interlocked information lifecycles. Each is continuing to demand ever greater capacity in diminishing space, weight and power envelopes, giving economic motivation to gaining as much as we can from conventional approaches as well as even greater potential for novel approaches.
Outside System Connectivity
RF wireless continues to be the primary means of connecting internet of things (IoT) devices to the internet, where IoT includes mobile phones, a wide range of sensors and actuators used in homes, businesses, factories and warehouses. automobiles, and aircraft. With the growth rate of IoT devices connected to the internet and growing number of high data rate applications (e.g. virtual reality, etc.), higher bandwidth will be needed to support the growth in communication between devices and with data centers. Many networks of sensors are specialized and the primary focus is on increasing energy efficiency and connection range but need to be connected to the internet. Clearly, the highest volume of high data rate applications will be smart mobile phones; however, with the development of autonomous vehicles they will need high bandwidth to receive telemetry data on traffic flow, obstructions and to send sensory data and decision analysis to the manufacturer and traffic control functions. As 5G is developed, mmWave will be implemented to connect micro base stations to the internet and mmWave and massive MIMO will be implemented to connect mobile phones, autonomous vehicles, robots, smart cities and smart homes to the internet. mmWave will require a higher density of base stations and focusing signals to users to connect applications to the internet due to atmospheric absorption and obstruction absorption. Massive MIMO will need to have multiple transmitters communicating with the user, but also find novel approaches of reducing power consumption. Forecast performance of CMOS, SiGe and III-V devices should meet the requirements of emerging RF applications; however, cost may become challenging for very high frequencies. Key challenges for improvement in the performance of CMOS, SiGe and III-V devices are reduction in resistance of conductors and reduction in contact resistivity.
More Moore
The More Moore International Focus Team (IFT) of the International Roadmap of Devices and Systems (IRDS) provides physical, electrical, and reliability requirements for logic and memory technologies to sustain power, performance, area, cost (PPAC) scaling for edge and cloud applications. This is done over a time horizon of 15 years for mainstream/high-volume manufacturing (HVM). Read the full chapter…
Lithography
Historically, improvements in lithography have enabled improved chip technologies. The International Roadmap for Devices and Systems (IRDS) Lithography roadmap predicts where current patterning capability can support future chip generations and where challenges and improvements are needed. It is intended to be used by semiconductor industry participants, by industry analysts, and by researchers who want or need to know how the industry will evolve in the future and what challenges need to be addressed. Read the full chapter…
Lithography tables file (XLSX, 522 KB)
LER white paper (PDF, 412 KB)
Yield Enhancement
The Yield Enhancement focus area is dedicated to activity ensuring that semiconductor manufacturing set up is optimized towards identifying, reducing, and avoiding yield relevant defects and contamination. Yield in most industries has been defined as the number of products made divided by the number of products that can be potentially made. In the semiconductor industry, yield is represented by the functionality and reliability of integrated circuits produced on the wafer surfaces. During the manufacturing of integrated circuits yield loss is caused, for example, by defects, faults, process variations, and design. The relationship of defects and yield, and an appropriate yield-to-defect correlation, is critical for yield enhancement. The Yield Enhancement (YE) chapter will display the current advanced and next generation future requirements for high yielding manufacturing of More Moore as well as More than Moore products separated in “critical process groups” including microelectromechanical (MEMS), back-end processes, e. g., packaging. Consequently, an inclusion of material specifications for Si, SiC, GaN, etc., are considered. Read the full chapter…
Yield Enhancement tables file (XLSX, 290 KB)
Proactive Particle Control in Ultrapure Water (PDF)
Metrology
The Metrology Chapter identifies emerging measurement challenges and knowledge gaps in devices, systems, and integration in the semiconductor industry and describes research and development pathways for meeting them. This includes, but is not limited to, measurement needs for extending CMOS, accelerating beyond CMOS technologies, novel communication devices, sensors and transducers, materials characterization and structure function relationships. This also includes metrology required in research and development, and process control in manufacturing environments. Read the full chapter…
Beyond CMOS & Emerging Materials Integration
Dimensional and functional scaling1 of CMOS is driving information processing2 technology into a broadening spectrum of new applications. Scaling has enabled many of these applications through increased performance and complexity. As dimensional scaling of CMOS will eventually approach fundamental limits, several new information processing devices and microarchitectures for both existing and new functions are being explored to extend the historical integrated circuit scaling cadence. This is driving interest in new devices for information processing and memory, new technologies for heterogeneous mintegration of multiple functions, and new paradigms for system architecture. This chapter, therefore, provides an IRDS perspective on emerging research device technologies and serves as a bridge between conventional CMOS and the realm of nanoelectronics beyond the end of CMOS scaling.
An overarching goal of this chapter is to survey, assess, and catalog viable emerging devices and novel architectures for their long-range potential and technological maturity and to identify the scientific/technological challenges gating their acceptance by the semiconductor industry as having acceptable risk for further development. This chapter also surveys beyond-CMOS devices for more than Moore (MtM) applications, e.g., hardware security. Read the full chapter…
Beyond CMOS tables file (XLSX, 162 KB)
Beyond CMOS EMI tables file (XLSX)
Cryogenic Electronics & Quantum Information Processing
The goal of this International Roadmap for Devices and Systems (IRDS) chapter is to survey, catalog, and assess the status of technologies in the areas of cryogenic electronics and quantum information processing. Application drivers are identified for sufficiently developed technologies and application needs are mapped as a function of time against projected capabilities to identify challenges requiring research and development effort.
Cryogenic Electronics and Quantum Information Processing tables file (XLSX)
Factory Integration
The Factory Integration (FI) chapter of the IRDS is dedicated to ensuring that the microelectronics manufacturing infrastructure contains the necessary components to produce items at affordable cost and high volume. Realizing the potential of Moore’s Law requires taking full advantage of device feature size reductions, new materials, yield improvement to near 100%, wafer size increases, and other manufacturing productivity improvements. This in turn requires a factory system that can fully integrate additional factory components and utilize these components collectively to deliver items that meet specifications determined by other IRDS international focus teams (IFTs) as well as cost, volume, and yield targets. Preserving the decades-long trend of 30% per year reduction in cost per function also requires capturing all possible cost reduction opportunities. These include opportunities in front-end as well as back end production, facilities, yield management and improvement, increased system integration such as up and down the supply chain and improving environmental health and safety. FI challenges play a key role realizing these opportunities and many FI technology challenges are becoming limiters to achieving major technology milestones.
More Than Moore - White Paper
Since its inception in 1998, the objective of the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) has been to identify the technical challenges that had to be addressed in order to ensure that microelectronics would be able to remain a driver for innovation in a wide range of applications. This has resulted in an industrial/academic agenda for pre-competitive research, which is continuously being updated to take into account new trends.
Over the years, the scope of the ITRS was enlarged to include not only the CMOS-based digital domain for memory and microprocessor devices (driven by miniaturization, as described by Moore’s Law), but also heterogeneous integration of multi-functional analog and mixed-signal technologies for smart system applications (More than Moore). At the same time, the perspective of the roadmap shifted from being mostly technology driven to being increasingly determined by application requirements. In line with this, the ITRS changed into the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems (IRDS™).
The roadmapping effort has given rise to new insights in innovation methodology and strategy. This is in particular the case for More than Moore, which requires a highly multidisciplinary R&D environment. It has become clear that progress in highly complex technology fields can only be achieved by cooperation along the complete innovation chain, which implies that multiple fields of expertise can be combined for the development of generic technology modules, which can be made available on open technology platforms. This trend is clearly demonstrated in the present developments in, e.g., the automotive industry and the medical domain.
The objective of the present More than Moore white paper is to provide an overview of a number of technology/application areas that are representative for the More than Moore domain in the sense that they require multifunctional heterogeneous system solutions, rather than miniaturization of devices only.