The paradigm of "more than Moore"

Abstract

Microelectronics has pervaded our lives for the past fifty years, with massive penetration into health, mobility, security, communications, education, entertainment, and virtually every aspect of human lives. In the past decades, as the main stream, these progresses are powered by Moore's law, with two focused development arenas, namely, IC miniaturization down to nano dimension, and SoC based system integration. While microelectronics community continues to invent new solutions around the world to keep Moore's law alive, there are ever-increasing awareness, R&D effort and business drivers to push the development and application of "more than Moore" (MtM) that are based upon or derived from silicon technologies but do not scale with Moore's law (with typical examples as RF, power, sensor and actuator, SiP, heterogeneous integration, etc.). This emerging trend is partially trigged by the increasing social needs for high level system integration including non-digital functionalities, the necessity to broaden the product portfolio of existing wafer fabs, and the limiting economic and time factors of advanced SoC development. Starting from the rationale of MtM, this paper will highlight some strategic research subjects for the major "MtM" related technology building blocks. Some issues related to the paradigm of MtM, covering industrial vision, strategy and business models, will also be discussed.