ITRS 2.0: Toward a re-framing of the Semiconductor Technology Roadmap

The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) has roadmapped technology requirements of the semiconductor industry over the past two decades. The roadmap identifies major challenges in advanced technology and leads the investment of research in a cost-effective way. Traditionally, the ITRS identifies major semiconductor IC products as drivers; these set requirements for the state-of-the-art semiconductor technologies.

High-performance microprocessor unit (MPU-HP) for servers and consumer portable system-on-chip (SOC-CP) for smartphones are two examples. Throughout the history of the ITRS, Moore's Law has been the main impetus for these drivers, continuously pushing the transistor density to scale at a rate of 2× per technology generation (aka “node”). However, as new requirements from applications such as data center, mobility, and context-aware computing emerge, the existing roadmapping methodology is unable to capture the entire evolution of the current semiconductor industry.

Today, comprehending how key markets and applications drive the process, design and integration technology roadmap requires new system-level studies along with chip-level studies. In this paper, we extend the current ITRS roadmapping process with studies of key requirements from a system-level perspective, based on multiple generations of smartphones and microservers. We describe potential new system drivers and new metrics, and we refer to the new system-level framing of the roadmap as ITRS 2.0.