Belgium’s semiconductor research institute imec released a development roadmap last month. The roadmap primarily outlines the development trends of semiconductor manufacturing technology from the 2020s to the 2040s and highlights several key technologies.
First, it should be noted that horizontal scaling reached its limits in the late 2010s. The trend of SRAM cell area shrinking by half every two years (with feature size shrinking by 0.7× every two years) continued until around 2010. After that, the pace slowed to halving every four years, roughly from 2012 to 2018.
In addition, despite continued advances in technology nodes since 2020, SRAM cell area has remained essentially unchanged. For the standard 6-transistor cell, the minimum area has stayed between 0.025 µm² and 0.023 µm².
SRAM Cell Area Scaling Trend from 1998 to 2025
Even though horizontal scaling is approaching its physical limits, the pursuit of higher density and higher performance in semiconductor integrated circuits must continue. Demand for higher density and performance in the artificial intelligence/high-performance computing (AI/HPC) sector remains strong.