Technology and Design Challenges of MOS VLSI

It is the purpose of this paper to explore some of the technological advances, apart from lithography, which will be required in MOS during the next decade. Feature size is an imperfect measure of technological sophistication, but it is universally understood, and will be used in this paper as a technology indicator. However, many technological advances besides lithography were required to scale MOS technology from 10 μm to 2.5 μm; the change from metal-gate PMOS to self-aligned Si-gate NMOS being the best example. And comparable technological advances will be required during the next decade to scale from 2.5 μm to 0.5 μm. This paper deals with these advances.