A couple of weeks ago, when I went to download a copy of the executive summary from the latest (AKA 2007) edition of the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, I noticed that the entire document was still not posted to the site.
The summary had been up since early January, as were a collection of working-group presentations delivered at the final ITRS meetings in Japan in early December. In years past, the final report in its entirety had been posted sometime in January. But as February drew to a close, the new roadmap was still not available for general industry consumption and digestion.
Yesterday, I checked the ITRS site again, and voila! the document---or at least most of it---was finally there. But the recent posting of the entire document wasn't obvious, with no blurb on the homepage or news page alerting visitors of the recent upload. I found it by doing a clickthrough from the "Edition Reports and Ordering" link in the left navbar, which took me to the page where the newly inserted link to the 2007 roadmap chapters resides.
To find out more about the delays in the publication process, I reached out to Linda Wilson, a long-time Sematech employee, who has managed the roadmap process for 15 years. Enjoying a working vacation among light snow flurries at her parents' lakeside abode outside of Memphis, TN, she first replied to my email query and then we chatted on the phone earlier today.
Linda told me that all but three chapters---modeling and simulation, environment, safety and health, and assembly/packaging---had been uploaded in the past few days. She expects the tardy trio to be "good to go by the end of this week," so the entire document will be available for free downloading. The digital tome will come in at around a hefty 950 pages this time (not including the table of contents or the voluminous glossary of acronyms), more than the previous edition completed in late 2005.
In her email, Linda explained that it's "not a big mystery about the month delay with the 2007 release." It was "due to several factors (some still pending) with the details of the Sematech move to Albany and the ITRS process, with the move originally including the ITRS department at Sematech. The transfer activity occurred during the typical wrap-up phase of the roadmap.... This is the first time that the roadmap has been delayed, affected by external events rather than actual ITRS or industry issues---and we have recovered the schedule these past few weeks."
Unlike previous update years, when Linda says things "just rocked along," the 2008 process won't provide much respite. "Even though it is an 'update' year, there are already lively discussions going on with respect to the traditional roadmap/industry drivers, 'Beyond CMOS,' and the inclusion of 'More than Moore,' the catch-phrase for functional diversity on chips and in packaging." She told me during our conversation that "with the way the industry is shaping up...we will take a more careful look at how to distinguish the various product drivers."
Making stronger connections between the ITRS and the iNEMI, IEEE, and MEMS industry roadmaps will also be a priority this year, she says, in order to try and stay as consistent with each document as possible and find important areas of "cross-pollinization...where we can complement each other," such as the quality of new materials and the metrology challenges of measuring those materials.
She praised the dedication of the 1200 or so participants in the roadmapping process, as well as the many "peripheral" folks within the various chipmaker and supplier companies who don't get any official credit for their contributions. "They're mostly volunteers, which really says something about their dedication....It's been a privilege to work with such talented, committed people."
That dedication gets put to the test once again, as work on the 2008 ITRS update ramps up in earnest in the coming weeks and months. The first workshop will be held April 3-4 in Koenigswinter, Germany, outside of Bonn, with the next round of meetings held during Semicon West week in San Francisco in mid-July. The revision will be wrapped up at meetings taking place in Seoul in early December.
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