report
8.2.5 Additional demand for research

The development of technologies in the "Beyond CMOS" domain involves a very complex environment, including everything in the development cycle from idea to realization and in the supply chain from materials science to volume manufacturing. In-depth know-how is needed at every stage in the process, while application markets are changing at the same time.

Emerging technologies offer very high option diversity and initially fragmented application markets. One of the main challenges will be to select promising technologies at a sufficiently early stage, while still keeping an open mind for possible disruptive ideas. Demonstrating the integration of innovative concepts into complex systems is essential. Better cooperation is needed to close the gap between system development and nanoscale device technologies.

Narrowing down the options should be done at successive decision points before committing to further R&D costs that often are at least an order of magnitude higher for each successive development stage. This process should bring ideas progressively to industrial relevance by involving multidisciplinary teams of material and device scientists, function designers and manufacturing experts.

Research topics for further computation scaling have been fairly well defined by the ITRS and the US Nanoelectronics Resarch Initiative (NRI), but a significant effort is still needed to define research vectors to investigate how nanotechnologies could provide application-driven new functionalities. A special emphasis should be put on the necessary co-development of emerging devices and of the associated system architectures needed for different applications.