Statistical Variations Are Inevitable - Can We Cope With Them?

The ever-decreasing size of wires and transistors on VLSI chips has driven the revolution in electronics over the past several decades. The features in advanced chips are now so small that variations in numbers of photons and numbers of atoms matter. Lithography of subwavelength device dimensions and statistical variations in the numbers of dopant atoms that elicit transistor behavior result in significant variation in the electrical properties of tiny transistors. Such variations are an inevitable consequence of miniaturization revealing the quantized nature of light and matter.