14. Conclusions and Outlook

We conclude this book by looking at the potential directions that IC industry is going to continue the Moore’s law scaling and the associated impacts to the non-logic devices discussed in previous chapters. We first review the fundamental limits to the continued IC scaling, including those implied by the quantum mechanics and quantum information theory. As we close to those fundamental limits, two main directions that IC industry is moving toward include the use of the vertical dimension and new materials to build new ICs. The later approach has resulted in the development of many emerging memory technologies, including STT-RAM, PCRAM, and RRAM. Both directions could open up new opportunities for designing new non-logic devices. Finally new computing paradigms, including quantum computing, may usher in fundamentally new processes for building these new computing devices.