How much longer will silicon be used?

EE October 1986 48 It sounds rather strange, against the background of the present development of microelectronics, to ask how much longer silicon will be used. The first quantities of one-megabit dynamic memories using existing silicon technology have been announced recently while four-mega- bit dynamic memories are expected in 1988. These are the most outstanding current examples of the state of the art of silicon microelectronics. These developments in large- scale integration (LSI) have been due to process tech- nology or, to put it the other way around, it was mastery of process tech- nology that made this progress in large-scale in- tegration possible. A reduction in costs per bit on an integrated device went hand in hand with this large-scale inte- gration. This is demonstrated by Fig. 1, which shows the evolution of costs per bit for the various gener- ations of dynamic RAMs as "learning curves". The learning curves for one- megabit and four-megabit dynamic RAMs are esti- ...