Past Progress and Future Challenges in LSI Technology: From DRAM and Scaling to Ultra-Low-Power CMOS

I think I was very fortunate to get a chance to work in microelectronics in its very early days. Those were very exciting times, particularly the day I found that I could build DRAM with just a single transistor and a capacitor. I wrote an internal paper and obtained a patent, but the first chance I had to work much on my idea came about four years later when the small team I worked with was challenged to make DRAM 25 times denser by reducing the layout dimensions from 5 ?m to 1 ?m. That is when we developed the scaling principles and showed how well they worked by building some experimental MOS transistors scaled to small dimensions. The progress in DRAM and all microelectronic devices and circuits has been amazingly successful since those first scaling principles were introduced. Many challenges have been met to achieve this, but today even more challenges have to be faced if progress is to continue.