Nanoelectronics in Retrospect, Prospect and Principle

The information revolution has been the paramount economic development of the past five decades. Its principal driver has been silicon microchip technology, which has advanced in productivity by a factor of approximately one billion and in performance by a factor of nearly one million. These concurrent advances have been implemented by a synergistic fusion of top-down-directed microtechnology (scaling feature sizes to 25-50nm) and bottom-up self-assembled nanotechnology producing 300mm diameter single-crystal ingots of silicon. CMOS dynamic power-delay product is projected to continue to benefit from scaling, but static gate tunneling current and subthreshold channel leakage current, device manufacturing tolerances, and interconnect delays progressively degrade from scaling. Consequently, novel ancillary technologies for increased chip input/output interconnect density, enhanced heat removal, and 3D chip stacking are viewed as possible ways of prolonging the exponential rate of advances in microchip technology. Following the anticipated saturation of these advances beyond 2020, a new genre of nanoelectronics is a coveted hope and one leading candidate appears to be graphene. However, we have not yet witnessed in graphene the 21st century equivalents of two Nobel Prize winning inventions: the transistor and the integrated circuit.
Dr. Meindl is the founding Director of the Marcus Nanotechnology Research Center, Director of the Pettit Microelectronics Research Center, and Pettit Chair Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In 2007, he was awarded Eminent Member of Eta Kappa Nu. He is a Life-Fellow of the IEEE and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. Dr. Meindl was the Founding Editor of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits and the recipient of the 1980 IEEE J.J. Ebers Award, the 1989 IEEE Solid-State Circuits Award, the 1990 IEEE Education Medal, the 1999 SIA University Research Award, the 2004 SRC Aristotle Award, and the 2006 IEEE Medal of Honor. He received his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctor’s degrees in electrical engineering from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (Carnegie Mellon University). Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he was the John M. Fluke Professor of Electrical Engineering and Associate Dean for Research at Stanford University and the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.