invited speakers

James D. Plummer

Jim Plummer is Dean of Engineering and Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Prior to becoming Dean, he was the chair of the EE department at Stanford. He received his BSEE degree from UCLA and MS and Ph.D. degrees in EE from Stanford.

Dr. Plummer is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the IEEE. He has received a number of awards for his research including, the 1991 Solid State Science and Technology Award from the Electrochemical Society, the 2001 Semiconductor Industry Association University Research Award, the 2003 IEEE Ebers Award and the 2007 IEEE Andrew S. Grove Award. He has graduated over 80 Ph.D. students with whom he has published more than 400 journal and conference papers. These papers have won 8 conference and student best paper awards. He has also received three teaching awards at Stanford. He serves on the Board of Directors of several public and start-up companies. His primary research interests are in nanoscale silicon devices.

Si CMOS - What Happens When Scaling Isn't an Option?

The foundation of the information technology revolution for the past 50 years has been the silicon integrated circuit. "Moore's Law" has enabled ever smaller transistors, constantly increasing chip complexity, increasing performance and lower cost for decades. Roughly every two years a new generation of CMOS technology appears with device dimensions 0.7X smaller than the earlier generation and a doubling of the number of transistors per unit area. Today's chips contain billions of transistors, each produced with dimensions as small as 32 nm.

Clearly Moore's Law will end some day. While it is true that people have predicted the end of scaling for almost as long as scaling has existed, many people today believe that the end of scaling will occur within a decade. When (not if) this happens, everything changes.

This talk will focus on the technical and economic issues that will make scaling very difficult in the not-too-distant future. I will also try to speculate about some of the implications of this change, for industry, for universities and for students thinking about careers in the 21st century.