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Research Areas

Where the path to tomorrow's IC technology lies

The power-performance-area (and cost) advances of the last five decades have mostly been achieved through dimensional scaling of the transistor. What will the semiconductor industry do after transistor scaling crosses the nanometer threshold, from 16/12 nm, 10 nm, 7 nm, 5 nm, 3 nm, 2 nm, 1.4 nm to sizes below a nanometer? Will these advanced logic technologies continue to provide the energy efficiency required of future computing systems? Will new applications and computation workloads demand new device technologies and their integration into future systems? These are some of the most pressing questions facing the semiconductor industry today.

The path for IC technology development going forward is no longer a straight line. The need for out-of-the-box solutions is ushering in a golden age of innovation. Future electronic systems will require co-innovation of the computing architecture together with device and packaging technology. In these pages, you will find some of the ideas that are in TSMC's research pipeline today.

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TSMC has been at the forefront of advanced CMOS logic technologies for which dense transistors are one of the two essential building blocks, the other being dense interconnect stacks. The intrinsic computing capability of a given logic technology is directly related to the number of interconnected transistors and their switching speed under representative loads originating from both the transistor or gates being driven and the related interconnect resistive and capacitive circuit loads.
TSMC research and development is continuously exploring novel and scalable transistor concepts to ensure sustainable, cost-effective, leading-edge logic technology performance and energy efficiency. We invite you to explore some of TSMC research areas in transistor structure, high-mobility channel, and low-dimensional materials and devices.
Data is the most valuable resource in today’s digital economy. Currently over 2.5 quintillion (10¹⁸) bytes of data are generated daily and the pace is accelerating. More data than ever needs to be processed. Memory plays a key role in the flow of data. The gap between logic and memory is a bottle neck to system performance. To optimize the trade-off between cost and performance, a hierarchical memory system has been adopted. At the top of the hierarchy are static random access memories (SRAM) and dynamic random access memory (DRAM), both inherently volatile. SRAM is integrated right on the logic chips as cache memory to provide fastest access. DRAM is physically smaller than SRAM and consequently supports higher capacity. DRAM is generally an off-chip memory solution and ~10x slower than SRAM due to the need for constant refresh. Non-volatile memories (NVM) such as Flash are next in the hierarchy providing much higher memory capacity and density while also preserving information in the absence of power.
Recent new technologies are emerging rapidly to bring processing tasks near to or inside the memory to improve computing efficiency and enable new functionalities. Emerging NVMs use new types of materials and mechanisms to store data. They are promising for blending the memory hierarchy to boost the overall performance. Furthermore, their unique characteristics offer great potential to enable new applications (e.g. neuromorphic computing) and novel architectures (e.g. 3D integration).
TSMC’s non-volatile memory solutions include Flash, Spin-transfer torque magnetic random access memory (STT-MRAM), and resistive random access memory (RRAM). TSMC is also actively exploring phase change random access memory (PCRAM), and spin-orbit torque MRAM (SOT-MRAM) elements, as well as selector devices which are essential to support higher density cross-point array architectures.
Interconnect is critically important for system performance. They are structures that connect two or more circuit elements (such as transistors) together electrically. In the past, interconnect was often referred to as on-chip interconnect of integrated circuits. Nowadays interconnect generally includes both on-chip interconnect of integrated circuits and off-chip interconnect in heterogeneous system integration. In interconnect design, geometric dimensions (width, thickness, spacing, aspect ratio, pitch), materials, process control and design layout are all critical to proper interconnect function, performance, power efficiency, reliability, and fabrication yield.
Circuit/ System design descriptions.
Since the last decade, we have been witnessing a steep rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as an alternative computing paradigm. Although the idea has been around since 1950s, AI needed progress in algorithms, capable hardware, and sufficiently large training data to become a practical and powerful tool. Progress in computing hardware has been a key ingredient for the AI renaissance and will remain increasingly critical to realize future AI applications.
We are particularly well-positioned to supply the most advanced AI hardware to our customers thanks to our leading-edge logic, memory, and packaging technologies. We have established a research pipeline for technology to enable leading-edge AI devices, circuits, and systems for decades to come. Near- and in-memory computing, embedded non-volatile memory technologies, 3D integration, and error-resilient computing are amongst our specific AI hardware research areas. Our in-house research is complemented by strong academic and governmental partnerships, which allow us to interact with and influence leading AI researchers around the world.