Electronic skin that gives robots the sense of touch... blazingly fast new transistor structures... circuits on transparent plastic films... microscopic machines combined with electronics. These and many other topics will be discussed at the 49th annual IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), slated for Dec. 8-10 at the Hilton Washington and Towers hotel in Washington, D.C. Short courses will precede the three-day conference on Sunday, Dec. 7.
Some 220 technical papers will be presented, along with several thought-provoking plenary talks and evening panel debates. Many papers will describe technologies once thought futuristic, like nanowires, nanotubes, and spintronics. Other presentations will investigate high-k and low-k dielectrics, strained silicon structures for high-performance transistors, new memory cells for nonvolatile flash storage, static RAMs and DRAMs, novel chalcogenide phase-change memories, and hybrid silicon/organic molecular memories. Further emerging memory technologies to be discussed use organic materials, direct tunneling structures, and "few-electron" memories based on nanometer-scale silicon dots.
Germanium will make a comeback as well. Stanford University researchers will describe the fabrication of n-channel MOSFETs in strained germanium, as n-channel devices are much harder to fabricate than p-channel devices. A paper by IHP will detail complementary heterojunction bipolar structures in silicon germanium with pnp devices that can deliver fmax values of up to 115 GHz. These devices are fabricated as part of a 250-nm CMOS process with no degradation of the CMOS devices.
In addition to the technical papers, three plenary presentations will cover rising technologies. Werner Weber of Infineon Technologies will present "Ambient Intelligence—Key Technologies in the Information Age." Next will be "Future Chip Technology for Mobile Communications" by Keiji Tachikawa of NTT DoCoMo. And, Joseph Bordogna of the National Science Foundation will examine "Nanotechnology Needs Today."
The two short courses preceding the conference will tackle "Silicon+: Augmented Silicon Technology" and "Interconnect Scaling: Materials and Systems." The evening panels will debate "Who Will Solve the Power Problem?" and "When Will CMOS Replace SiGe Heterojunction Bipolar Transistors?"
For a detailed program and registration information, visit the meeting's Web site at www.ieee.org/conference/iedm.