A new direction in integrated circuit technology

Many people worry about the future of IC technology, since the effect of technology scaling has been saturated. We should change our way of thinking. A saturation of process technology will induce emergences of new design technologies, new integration technologies, and new application areas. Digital system design will adopt high throughput architectures to realize higher processing throughput, even if the clock frequency has saturated. Utilization of multi-core design, parallel processing, and dedicated processing engines used in video processors will increase. Three-dimensional integration technology will be employed to shorten the interconnection delay and to realize real integrated systems that need heterogeneous device integration. Millimeter wave SoC will realize several Gbps wireless communication. The wavelength will be comparable to the length of elements on a chip and the use of transmission lines and on-chip antennas will be feasible. New circuit technology that can address EM control will work on a chip such as phased array antenna systems. Micro power technology will emerge to control and transmit electrical power.