End of the Downsizing and World after that

Abstract

The progress of the electronics has been conducted by the downsizing of electron devices for more than 100 years since its beginning in early 20th century. However, it is believed now that the downsizing will reach its limit within several years because of several sure reasons. After reaching the limit there is no Moore’s law, and we cannot expect such a tremendous progress in cost, performance and energy consumption as we experienced in the past. Although the market for CMOS devices will still keep increasing for future, the technology development will spread to large spectrum of different devices, such as sensor, memory, power, photovoltaic, battery, MEMS devices which are demanded for the coming IoT environment, where everything is connected with internet. This will become a virtual extension of Moore’s law, and will cause a big paradigm change in a system and society level. In a long term, however, even with the tremendous progress of AI technologies, the system fabricated on the solid-state devices and their network cannot compete with the existing bio system constructed on organic system, in efficiency and maintenance. Thus, the technology how to use the bio system better, or how to combine electron and bio systems better will become very important.