To reduce power dissipation and power density significantly without sacrificing computing performance, we need to invent a new transistor, a logic device that can be an alternative to CMOS. It should operate under very low supply voltage, much lower than 0.5V—closer to 250mV or even 100mV.

I am not proposing to replace CMOS. I am proposing we develop an energy-efficient device beyond CMOS. It could be used to implement application-specific compute engines, augmenting general-purpose computing in CMOS.

I believe CMOS technology can be a platform for capabilities beyond CMOS with which we can design compute engines as well as analog circuits such as those for clocking and data input and output. The reason we seek a logic device operating below 0.5V is that we need to reduce the energy dissipated in chip interconnects.

We need not only to reduce the energy in the switching of the logic gates (the basis of Dennard scaling), but even more crucially to reduce the energy in moving the data on the interconnect wires. The energy per bit of data moved around the chip–estimated by CV2 where C =capacitance and V= signal swing–is becoming the dominant component of power consumption in computing.

An interconnect wire with as low as 100mV of signal on it has enough signal-to-noise ratio to operate without any errors. However, CMOS logic cannot detect a 100mV signal without a considerable loss of speed, so we need a new transistor device that can detect this 100mV signal and thus switch in response to this signal.

By inventing a better transistor device as well as monolithically integrating the circuit technology (remember Robert Noyce’s process invention), we can break through the constraint of power density. This is the technology that we seek to enable in the manufacture of high-performance computing products well into the future. Such a technology will have significant impact across computing, information processing, and communications.

Over more than the past 50 years, the creativity of the semiconductor industry’s technologists has driven Moore’s Law forward. I believe this inventiveness will continue, given the opportunity, but it will require a research priority and focus like that of the Manhattan Project.

The semiconductor industry must identify the best principles of physics to operate a new kind of device and interconnect and find the materials and methods to fabricate them. I call this revolutionary device a beyond-CMOS integrated circuit.

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