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NanoElectronics Roadmap for Europe: Identification and Dissemination

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - NEREID (NanoElectronics Roadmap for Europe: Identification and Dissemination)

Berichtszeitraum: 2017-05-16 bis 2018-12-15

"For more than 20 years, the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors has helped the industry to follow Moore’s Law, with a constant reduction in device costs and an exponential growth in semiconductor market. The main role of ITRS has been in providing research guidance for the many actors of the semiconductor ecosystem, in synchronizing the technology development and the timely availability of manufacturing equipment and methods and in providing focus on critical bottlenecks.
However, the “technology push” that has been at the base of ITRS has recently shown its limits: device size and speed are no longer the only parameters of importance, and the integration of new functionalities, required by new applications, needs the incorporation of special metrics in the roadmap process. This new trend, called “More than Moore”, refers to technologies that do not necessarily scale according to ""Moore's Law“ and requires expanding the focus from chips to systems and opening the doors to new markets.
This trend has been especially relevant for European semiconductor industry that has stepped out of the markets for extremely advanced logic and memories, to focus of segments of greater relevance for the European applications industry, like Automotive, Industrial and Medical.
The NEREID project has been accepted in the Nanoelectronics call “H2020 ICT 25 – 2015: Generic micro- and nano-electronic technologies” to develop a long term roadmap focused on European needs.
The roadmap for Nanoelectronics developed by NEREID combines an “application pull” approach, focusing on the requirements of European semiconductor and applications industry and main societal challenges, with the “technology push” coming from the advanced concepts developed by Research Centres and Universities in order to achieve an early identification of promising novel technologies. The final NEREID roadmap focuses on the identification of medium and long term requirements, gaps and recommendations.
The NEREID roadmap has the purpose to improve the coordination between academic and industrial research in Nanoelectronics, and to provide guidelines for future research programmes at European and National level. It covers the main technology sectors: More Moore (Innovative FETs and Memories), Connectivity, More than Moore (Smart Energy, including Energy Harvesting and Smart Sensors), Beyond-CMOS, Heterogeneous Integration, System design, Materials, Equipments and Manufacturing Science.

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The project relies on a wide basis of application and technology experts (more than 100), coming from leading research actors in industry and academia, and combines a top-down with a bottom-up approach. The first used three general Workshops with the participation of application experts to provide a view of application requirements, while the latter used technology Domain Workshops (for WPs and Tasks) in dedicated sectors or cross-domain Workshops, which provide a bottom-up view of technology evolution.
An international Advisory Board insures the link with roadmap activities in other areas, like US, Taiwan and Japan. A strong link has been already established with IRDS (International Roadmap of Devices and Systems).
Three General Workshops, have been organized in April 2016 in Grenoble, April 2017 in Athens, and June 2018 in Sardinia, stimulating convergence between applications and nanoelectronic technologies. Many Domain Workshops have also been organized. Three Advisory Boards, with high level representatives from US, Japan, Taiwan and EU, have also been organized.
Many dissemination activities have been conducted in the framework of European Meetings (e.g. EFECS, ESSDERC-ESSCIRC, EUROSOI-ULIS, ICT, etc. or international Conferences and Workshops - US, Asia -, and using flyers, posters, press releases, video, publications, web sites, e-mailing, etc).
The scenarios given for the evolution of the products/applications has helped defining common requirements for major functions, from which the evolution of the underlying technologies and devices have been elaborated. A first draft of the roadmap has been released in Summer 2017 and the final Roadmap has been released in December 2018 taking into account the recommendations of the Review Meetings, the Advisory Board, and the Workshops and Conferences organized in the framework of NEREID.
NEREID roadmap starts from a few key European application areas (Energy, Automotive, Medical/Life science, Security, IoT/Smart connected objects, Mobile convergence, Digital Manufacturing), while, for what concerns sectors like data processing, a strong connection has been established with roadmap initiative taking place in other regions, like IRDS. The fact that potential users of Nanoelectronics provide insight on the technology requirements in terms of both performances and timescale for the future products, while technology experts illustrate the potential for new breakthrough innovations, is the original contribution of NEREID and goes beyond the traditional methods that have been used up to now.
This interaction between technology and application experts led to the early identification of future technology bottlenecks, needing focused R&D activities, and, at the same time, made application experts aware of the potential of emerging technologies for breakthrough products. The NEREID roadmap will therefore play an important role in increasing the competitiveness of European companies.
The NEREID Roadmap, focused on medium and long term time horizons, is complementary to the AENEAS Strategic Agenda and the ECSEL MASRIA, which are focusing on shorter terms. In addition, the NEREID Roadmap includes planned detailed evolutions of the main Figure of Merits as a function of time horizons for the most promising technologies, which is also an added value compared with the ECS Strategic Research Agenda. NEREID is also developing a joint collaboration with the International IRDS Roadmap especially in the field of More Moore, Beyond CMOS and computing systems, where there is a strong interest in Europe for specific activities dealing with very low power systems, like IoT. NEREID was in charge of the Long Term Grand Challenges of the 1st IRDS Roadmap released in June 2018. On the other side, NEREID is also complementary to IRDS in the More than Moore domain (e.g. Smart Sensors, Smart Energy, Energy Harvesting), which are recognized as sectors of sound European competence, which will lead to many innovative electronic systems beyond computing. Therefore, NEREID represents an unprecedented European effort to envision and plan the evolution of the most important Nanoelectronic technologies, which will lead to disruptive applications and many new markets, strengthening the international position of the European economy and having a great potential impact on the European society.