SoC - what are our technology futures?

Many of us discovered that we were working in System-on-Chip technology by default! The technology to put hundreds of millions of transistors on a monolithic CMOS digital chip became available over the past few years; we adopted it and became de facto SoC researchers. However, as SoC has come on stream we have also started to see cracks appearing in the technology. 3rd order effects ofjust a few years ago have become predominant problems, and previous performance predictions have been shown to be false. This talk will undoubtedly produce more questions than answers, but, as an interested observer of the technologies we play with in our sand box, I will try to ponder on some of the issues - and muse on how those amongst us, who normally only observe, can also play a role in defining and exploring promising future technologies. Brief Bio: Graham Jullien holds the iCORE Chair in Advanced Technology Information Processing Systems, and is the Director of the ATIPS Laboratories, in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Calgary. His long-term research interests are in the areas of Integrated Circuits (including SoC), VLSI Signal Processing, Computer Arithmetic, High Performance Parallel Architectures, and Number Theoretic Techniques. Since taking up his chair position at Calgary in 2001, he has expanded his research interests to include security systems, nano-electronic technologies and biomedical systems. He is currently involved, along with his colleagues, in developing an Integration Laboratory cluster to explore next generation integrated microsystems. Dr.