The Impact of Materials Science on the Evolution of Integrated Circuit Processing

The rapid increases in information processing technology are possible because of the continued improvement in the cost and performance of Integrated Circuits. The conventional metrics of productivity and performance applied to IC's are: increases in clock speed, increases in functional density, and increases in function per unit cost. Although the minimum lithographic features size is most often tracked as the dominant processing parameter relating to performance improvements, much of the technological innovation that has made progress possible was achieved by solving problems familiar to physical metallurgists.