Trends in the semiconductor industry

Sri Samavedam, senior vice president of CMOS technologies at imec, reviews important semiconductor industry trends

Which are the new innovations in logic CMOS scaling that will be introduced in industry in the coming years?

Using the wafer backside for power delivery to the devices is the next major performance booster that will be introduced. The conventional metal layers on the frontside of the wafer will be used for routing signals, while the metal layers at the back of the wafer will be used for power delivery. Separating the power delivery and signal routing enables lower voltage drop in the power supply (which improves performance) and reduces congestion of metal routing on the frontside. Intel has announced that they will introduce this at the 2nm node with nanosheet devices.