Aug 24, 2018 Bill Bottoms (Co- Chair Hetero Integration Roadmap (HIR))

Bill Bottoms, a pioneer in semiconductor test who co-chairs the HIR committee, pointed to a report on semiconductor research published last year by Semiconductor Research Corp. titled, “Semiconductor Research Opportunities: An Industry Vision and Guide.” Bottoms summarized the report by saying research will enable groundbreaking advancements in applications such as AI, IoT, high-performance computing and the “ever-connected world that society has come to expect and depend upon.”

But Bottoms noted that the bulk of semiconductor R&D has focused throughout much of the industry's history on the advancement of Moore's Law. “But the economic end of Moore's Law, if not already here, is coming. No one disputes that,” Bottoms said.

To move forward, Bottoms continued, new technologies are required. New devices are needed to augment silicon-based transistors. And novel computing architectures must be developed to replace the traditional von Neumann architecture, leading to entirely new computing paradigms.

“We've got to work together across industry, government and academia,” Bottoms said. “And we have to work across country boundaries.”

According to Bottoms, while CMOS scaling will continue, the only parameter that is advancing noticeably is density, while cost, power and performance gains are falling short of what was historically expected.

“Heterogeneous integration is the only solution that will allow the Moore's Lawy pace of progress to be continued for decades to come,” Bottoms said. “Power requirements, latency, cost and performance at the system level are dominated by the interconnect rather than the transistors. Heterogeneous integration enables system level integration in a SiP where all the active functions are as densely packed as possible. Interconnect will be  photonic moving the photons as close to the transistors as possible.”

Bottoms listed a number of benefits to heterogeneous integration, including multiple orders of magnitude of performance improvements in the same process node, power reduction through replacing electronic wiring with optical wiring where practical and incremental cost improvements through integrating cost effective components one function at a time.

"The greatest single breakthrough in the near term will be the integration of photonics into SiP products and efficiently connecting these systems with optical signals to everything else,"