Will More-than-Moore Take Off in China?

By Mo Dakang
EETimes (August 20, 2019)

Most semiconductor enterprises in China are focusing on their survival and profit. It's impractical to force them to keep following Moore's Law or trying the IDM model for memory volume production.

Professor Bo Zhang of the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China recently suggested that "More than Moore" will become an important opportunity for the Chinese semiconductor industry. Professor Zhang's unique insights on this topic are now attracting interest from the industry.

The “More-than-Moore” concept seems new. It's not. Professor Zhang said that it is, actually, nothing more than one of the three directions of Moore's Law.

Professor Zhang refers to the “More-than-Moore process” as “non-size dependent.” It describes the improvement of the value or performance of the device, not by the size reduction, but by the increase of functions.

Moore's Law has governed the semiconductor industry for more than 50 years, shrinking the size of transistors and enlarging the diameters of wafers, with the former playing a critical role.

But Moore’s Law has its limitations. It worked in an era when increasing the density of transistors reduced costs. Moore’s Law, however, failed to predict the greater power consumption at the cost of improved transistor performance. This has prompted the industry in recent years to look at other dimensions of the Law – namely, “non-size dependent" processes.

Why More-than-Moore now?

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