Future Trends in Microelectronics

1.1

Prospects of Future Si Technologies in the Data-Driven World

Kinam Kim and Gitae Jeong

Semiconductor Business Division, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Giheung, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea

1 Introduction

The evolution of human knowledge has been accelerated by storing and sharing information, which had been accomplished by using paper until twentieth century. In recent decades, magnetic tape and hard disk drives (HDDs) have taken over the role, as paper has been supplanted by semiconductor memory and storage.

Nowadays, it is expected that the amount of data will be doubling in every 2 years from 4.4 ZB in 2013 to 44 ZB in 2020.¹ The number of Internet-connected devices will increase from 0.5 billion in 2002 to 50 billion in 2020,² giving rise to the tremendous growth of Internet protocol (IP) traffic, which is expected to exceed 10²¹ bytes per year in 2016. The huge amount of information has a great impact on our daily lives, which can be filled with comfort, convenience, and safety by using and analyzing the so-called big data. That is, we live in data-driven world, where data-driven decision management,³ agriculture,⁴ health care,⁵ and even data-driven journalism⁶ are now a reality. It is noteworthy that we can store, share, and utilize the huge amount of data with the aid of silicon (Si) technology. This means that the novel Si technologies will be deployed to continuously enrich the data-driven world of the future.

In order to fully utilize big data, we need more accurate ...