Abstract
CMOS circuits have been the workhorse of ICT for 40 years. Due to the unique scaling property of this technology, energy efficiency has enormously improved during that time, notably by lowering the supply voltage from the long-time standard of 5 to 1 V and less. As the era of “happy scaling” has come to an end, progress becomes increasingly difficult and techniques beyond 2D size reductions have come into play. A superior and viable alternative to CMOS has yet to be found.
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Notes
- 1.
Current expectations are that MOSFETs should continue to behave as such down to a channel length in the order of 7 nm before source-to-drain tunneling will likely render further shrinks pointless. Whether the electrical properties and unit costs of such devices will justify the tremendous capital expenditures required to develop and produce them remains an open question, though.
- 2.
See [6] for a study on the impact of cloud computing on ICT energy consumption.
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Kaeslin, H. (2015). Semiconductor Technology and the Energy Efficiency of ICT. In: Hilty, L., Aebischer, B. (eds) ICT Innovations for Sustainability. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 310. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09228-7_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09228-7_5
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