ICPS 2014

14:00-14:40
Plenary: Marvin L. Cohen
Semiconductors: A Pillar of Pure & Applied Science

I have the privilege of giving you an overview of the central role semiconductor research has played in basic and applied science. I will focus mainly on the former with some general comments about applications such as the transistor, integrated circuits, solar devices and lasers that have come from basic research. There are also many links to other branches of physics and more generally other areas of science and fields like electrical engineering, computer science, material science, medical science, and chemistry that have led to applications that have made significant contributions to our everyday life. However, others will speak more about these.

I will focus mainly on how semiconductor studies have influenced the intellectual and conceptual aspects of some areas of physics. Studies of the electronic structure of semiconductors resulted in this area becoming a large part of the theoretical foundation of modern condensed matter physics and materials science. Studies of correlation effects in semiconductors led to the quantum Hall effects, fractional charges, new superconductors, topological insulators, Mott systems, and a number of other areas of research that have become among the most active in physics Some of these studies have influenced other areas of physics and chemistry. Semiconductor research has been highly recognized. Starting with the transistor, there have been eight Nobel Prizes in Physics awarded for research in this field.

14:40-15:20
Plenary: Bob Doering
History of Semiconductor Electronics 

The history of semiconductor electronics is a very rich subject. This presentation will address it via highlighting a selection of major inventions and their implementations, focusing on transistor technology. This history goes back at least to the invention of the field-effect transistor in 1925. However, it was not until the demonstration of the point-contact transistor in 1947 and, especially the invention of the bipolar-junction transistor in 1951, that semiconductor electronics began to have a significant impact. Early transistors were germanium, which quickly gave way to more robust silicon devices in the early 1950s. Of course, the next great advance was the invention/demonstration of the integrated circuit in 1958. This allowed the exploitation of feature-size scaling to enable reliable electronic circuits with the well-known exponential trends of improvement in performance, energy-efficiency, and cost that we have now enjoyed for over 50 years. The last three decades of this era has been dominated by CMOS technology, which has carried the semiconductor electronics industry to an annual worldwide market of over $300B. Thus, we will review some of the major steps in the advancement of CMOS as it has, thus far, been scaled to gate lengths on the order of 20 nanometers in commercial products. 

15:20-16:00
Plenary: Thomas Theis
The Future of Digital Nanoelectronics

The Field Effect Transistor (FET)sparked the information technology revolution. Now, after decades of devoting resources to improving the FET, leading U.S. semiconductor companies are increasing their research investment in new devices and circuit architectures with the potential to take information technology beyond the inherent limits of the FET. Through NRI, and now STARnet, industry has partnered with NSF, NIST, and DARPA to promote university research on this new frontier. New materials and device concepts offer the potential to reduce energy consumption per logical operation by two to three orders of magnitude. Tunneling FETs (TFETs) based on III-V heterostructures are promising for very low power applications where switching speed is a secondary concern. They are already the subject of experiments at industrial labs. Newer TFET concepts, based on metal dichalcogenides and other two-dimensional materials, may ultimately switch faster than the FET. Nanomagnetic devices will switch more slowly, but offer the intriguing combination of memory and logic functions in one device. Despite the excitement and the growing research investment, the landscape of promising research opportunities outside the "FET box" is vast and cannot be fully explored with current funding.