It is a common view among the leading professionals in nanoelectronics that its current explosive development will likely lead to profound paradigm shifts in the near future.  The driving industries of the information economy – mobile personal-digital-assistance, to sensor networks and GSP-directed services, to displays and lighting – are already in the process of paradigm shift, sometimes painfully.  Is this a temporary change of fortune or fundamental shift?  Are we banging against technological limits or the shift is rooted in economics?  What are the plausible scenarios and where are the new areas of opportunity for the future evolution of nanoelectronics?

Thus far, information technology itself has been a great and celebrated success, but it has been a narrow one in that it is still largely confined to information processing and transmission, whereas many of the tremendous opportunities in acquiring and executing on information have yet to be explored.  Perhaps the moment has arrived for nanoelectronics to extend and broaden its reach, inspired by and interfacing directly with the unique capabilities of biological, biomolecular, superconducting, and nanomechanical systems. Or perhaps the much cheered quantum computing, molecular electronics and spintronics could come to the rescue of digital computing and would fare better than the much hyped and now forgotten optical computing.

Our civilization is destined to be based on electronics. For better or worse. Ever since the invention of the transistor and especially after the advent of integrated circuits, semiconductor devices have kept expanding their role in our life. Electronic circuits entertain us and keep track of our money, they fight our wars and decipher the secret codes of life, and one day, perhaps, they will relieve us from the burden of thinking and making responsible decisions. Inasmuch as that day has not yet arrived, we have to fend for ourselves. The key to success is to have a clear vision of where we are heading in these turbulent times. Identifying the scenario for the future evolution of microelectronics presents a tremendous opportunity for constructive action today. A free-spirited debate between the leading professionals in the Industry, Government, and Academia is the main purpose of the planned Workshop.

The celebrated Si technology has known a virtually one-dimensional path of development: reducing the minimal size of lithographic features. This dramatic evolution has both led us to the threshold of nano-technology and at the same brought about doubts regarding future development. Our crystal ball is muddy. This is going to be the nano millennium… but how about femto-electronics? There are clearly physical limits but can we be reasonably sure that electronics will not dip below 1 nm in the next 1000 years?

New electronic materials, most powerful enabler of new technologies, will naturally be a central theme in the program. The evolution of semiconductor electronics has always been intimately connected with advances in material science and technology. Differentiating from usual materials meetings our workshop will discuss materials prospects and fundamentals in the context of future technologies. 

The roles of lithography and materials growth may well be reversed in the future.  Development of new and exotic lithographic techniques with a nanometer resolution will be setting the stage for the exploration of various physical effects in mesoscopic devices, while epitaxially grown devices will be gaining commercial ground.  When (and whether) this role reversal will take place, will be determined perhaps as much by economic as by technical factors. Further progress may then require circuit operation at cryogenic temperatures or heavy reliance on optical interconnections.  Implementation of the latter within the context of silicon ULSI may usher in hybrid-material systems with heteroepitaxial islands of foreign crystals grown on Si substrates.  Further, the dominant role of crystalline semiconductors may give way to a more varied technological landscape of semiconductor electronics interfacing directly with the unique capabilities of biological, biomolecular, superconducting, and nanomechanical systems.  However muddy our crystal ball may be regarding the future trends in microelectronics, one trend appears to be clear: the device designer of tomorrow will be thinking in terms of hybrid multilayer structures defined on an atomic scale.

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• The current ITRS roadmap extends CMOS technology to 2022,  what comes beyond that in the more-than-Moore silicon-compatible device arena?

• Do other degrees of freedom, such as spin, phase transitions or quantum entanglement, have any realistic prospects in digital logic or are the hopes for spintronics and the like a pipe dream?

• Is bio-nanoelectronics a coming reality?  Implantable chips in the brain, bio-batteries running on bodily fluids? 

• Will computing architectures depart from the binary serial paradigm due to power dissipation or wiring problems?  Can quantum computing save us?

• What could be expected from pushes for extreme electronics – extremely high electron concentration materials, extremely large and small bandgaps, single-photon light sources and detectors, and single-spin processing.

• Where are the big stake market pulls and pushes for new semiconductor technologies?

• What is happening with the counter-culture technologies like non-lithographic nanofabrication, non-semiconductor electronics, macro-electronics, non-von Neumann computing, DNA assisted self-assembling and packaging?

• Are photovoltaics on the way to a commodity product driven exclusively by cost or is there room for innovation?  Is the same true for displays?

• Gamma spectroscopy and semiconductor radiation detectors – a new sensor frontier of ever-greater relevance?

• What is the next green pasture for LEDs – lighting, medical, or human experience?

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