The Semiconductor industry has achieved extraordinary growth in productivity over the last 50 or more years through investment in basic research. The industry has depended on this basic research to find the breakthrough materials, structures, designs and architectures to enable the development of new technologies and applications. Much of that research has been defined and planned through the road mapping of needs that were determined by Moore's law driven device and technology scaling. The industry is now facing a more challenging period where a mature technology environment will require more research diversity that goes beyond issues of device scaling. The research directions will be driven by more applications research and massive parallelism in the architectures. In addition to information processing and communication, exploiting recent advances in nanoscience to realize new technologies for energy, the environment, and for bio-medical applications are increasingly important. The new research needs will also require new methods of funding and of creating the means of industry realizing value in University research. The current plans and directions to meet these needs will be described.

Steven Hillenius is executive vice president of the Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC, Research Triangle Park, N.C.). In addition to his governance responsibilities for SRC he is responsible for managing the Global Research Collaboration (GRC). Before SRC, he headed technology development and collaborative interactions for Agere Systems and Bell Laboratories. His team at Bell Labs was the first to produce 60 nm transistors, and they conducted much of the early materials innovation on high-k gate dielectrics and novel three-dimensional device structures. Prior to Bell Labs, he was an Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of Virginia, where his research involved low temperature solid-state physics. Dr. Hillenius has eight patents in the area of semiconductor device structures and has published over 70 articles and book chapters on semiconductor devices and processing. He is a fellow of the IEEE and a member of Sigma Xi, AAAS and APS. Dr. Hillenius has served in many volunteer and elected positions within the IEEE, including president of the Electron Devices Society, member of the Education Advisory Board, and a member of the Technical Advisory Board and the Board of Directors. He received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Virginia in 1979.

Philip F. Bagwell Lecture

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Steven James Hillenius (2009), "Research Directions for the Semiconductor Industry in 2009," https://nanohub.org/resources/6457.

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1. Bagwell Lecture
2. nanoelectronics
3. research seminar
4. transistors