An Electronics Division Retrospective (1952-2002) and Future Opportunities in the Twenty-First Century

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Abstract
The emergence of crystalline silicon and silicon-based materials such as silicon-germanium as the premier materials and the personnel driving the integrated circuit (IC) microelectronics revolution will be reviewed. The major threshold events from the 1940s through the mid-1960s, presaging the onset of the large scale integration microelectronics era, will be highlighted. The major silicon material challenges such as dislocation-free single-crystal growth, plastic deformation, the point-defect dilemma, gettering, oxygen in silicon, carrier lifetime, and controlled point-defects in the silicon crystal during the evolution of silicon microelectronics from large scale integration through the very large scale integration era in the 1970s and the 1980s into the ultralarge scale integration era of the 1990s will then be reviewed. Opportunities in epitaxy, wafer cleaning, silicon-on-insulator, silicon-germanium, IC scaling and potential changes in device configuration and IC architecture in the evolution towards the 64 Gbit DRAM and 9 G transistor high-performance MPU logic era in 2016 (per the 2001 edition of the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors) will be discussed in the context of silicon-based microelectronics. The complementary role of compound semiconductors, nanoelectronics and the continuing initiative to obtain an optoelectronic system compatible with silicon will also be discussed. Finally, nonsilicon materials and device configurations will briefly be noted. © 2002 The Electrochemical Society. All rights reserved.