Nanoelectronics Device Technologies: CMOS, Beyond and the Mysterious Case of Ockham´s Razor

Summary form only given. Devices (and underlying materials and technology) are a starting point towards circuits, and ultimately systems designed using an appropriate architecture that can provide properties desired for the electronics environment. The current research in silicon nanoscale transistor area has a preponderance of efforts aimed towards improvement in electrostatics such as using nanowires and multiple gates or electrodynamics such as using strain to improve transport. The author discusses the more interesting of these as well as other unconventional attempts, and argues that while in the tradition of scaling and Moore´s law this looks appropriate, the imperatives of research of the moment are quite different and a significantly broader look is required. Electronics has evolved into a complex system. To understand and to make the system perform, we need to optimize and utilize systematically all the attributes of a complex system: non- linearity, coupling and connection of scales, hierarchy and adaptation. The Ion/Ioff ratio is the currently favored measure of non-linearity at the device level, the approaches of functional integration and system-on-chip relate to the connections of scales, and the various networking/multi-core approaches are examples of hierarchy. Ability to adapt, a central tenet of evolution - the most complex system that we know, does not occupy the attention across all scales of length and time in our traditional partitioned view. The result is an unsustainable evolution of a complex system in which conservation of energy and working within energy limitations does not get the attention it deserves across scales. All electromagnetic systems, charge and spin based, e.g. have fundamental constraints related to energy, and issues of time-scale, defects, temperature, etc. are all interconnected to the energy transfer. The energy scale affects all the characteristics - from the building to the operation. The author shows through results - - of experimental and theoretical work that adaptation at the device level such as through back-gates, coupling and connections of scales and hierarchy such as through three-dimensional integration and chip-scale networking, are necessary for a sustainable evolution of electronics at nanoscale in the era of complexity. So, in this talk the author connects energy to device, circuit and system needs and show examples to connect energy to defect rates and limits on defect tolerance through design, hierarchical benefits that 3D integration provides in certain cases, and the role that networked chip-scale communication will have to play in massively integrated complex systems.