Humans aspire for the rich, secure IT society. It can be said that the key to the development of the robot industry and of personal mobile electronic products is the development of higher performance, low energy consumption electronic devices. At AIST the development of next generation devices is being performed in various aspects to support the ubiquitous society.

Devices to support the ubiquitous society are required to be small so that they can be installed anywhere, to have low energy consumption so that they can be used even in large numbers and also to be highly functional to satisfy increasingly high level demands.

At AIST, research strategies are decided and research issues are repeatedly discussed. Currently, silicon CMOS is the main technology used in data processing devices but the continuing pursuit of performance improvements in CMOS devices through miniaturization is, because of physical and engineering difficulties, reaching its limit. Together with miniaturization, the introduction of new materials, new transistor structures and new processes, and further improvement of manufacturing techniques, have become indispensable. At the same time, the measurement and analysis technology that supports these has become extremely important.

Also, having the limits of silicon CMOS technology in sight, many devices with different principles of operation from CMOS have been proposed but at present no specific candidate replacing CMOS has been settled upon. Also, difficulties are being pointed out with memories (DRAM, SRAM, flash etc.) the capacity of which has increased remarkably. Proposals and development are aimed toward the practical utilization of new forms of high speed, non-volatile, CMOS compatible memory.

As research and development strategies for next generation data processing devices to support the ubiquitous society, when thinking about the above logic circuits and memory devices, three technologies shown in this pamphlet can be considered to play extremely important roles.

The three technologies introduced here are as follows.

First, with regard to silicon semiconductors, which represent the mainstream in current technology, the results of size reduction, low electricity consumption and high level functionality research at the Advanced Semiconductor Research Center are presented. Next, research on XMOS transistors, which aim at high speed with the introduction of a new gate structure, is explained. Thirdly research regarding memory which retains data even after the power supply is turned off is presented. The last two researches are mainly pursued in the Nanoelectronics Research Institute.

Figure 1 shows an extract of in the information technology and electronics field, the roadmap relating to electronic devices. The part labeled "Semiconductor device technology to realize high speed & low electricity consumption" in the upper half of the diagram shows the roadmap corresponding to the silicon semiconductor research pursued by the Advanced Semiconductor Research Center together with the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and to the XMOS research being pursued by the Nanoelectronics Research Institute. The section labeled "Establishment of ultra low consumption and high density memory technology for the realization of normally off computers" in the lower half corresponds to the roadmap for non-volatile memory research pursued at the Nanoelectronics Research Institute.

At AIST, there is a super clean room (SCR Bldg.) maintained by the Advanced Semiconductor Research Center together with industrial companies, a clean room at Nano materials Bldg. The device development phase being carried out at these facilities is shown in Figure 2.

At the SCR Bldg, mainly the Advanced Semiconductor Research Center, is doing research to make current silicon semiconductors smaller, faster and lower in electricity consumption. And in Nanomaterials Bldg. research into next generation technology is carried out.

By making the facilities, especially SCR Bldg., open for use by companies and universities, AIST hopes to fulfill the role of "knowledge concentration center" for a semiconductor device technology. We are discussing the issues with related parties. AIST aims to function as a "hub" to bring about innovation in the IT society, constructing a world leading knowledge base system for the nanoelectronics field and setting as its goal contribution to the continuing development of the electronics industry. For example, as a technology system for pursuing the limits of CMOS miniaturization, AIST aims to construct a base system that can be used to predict and analyze device properties, by combining, technology for devices with new materials and new structures, process technology, measurement/analysis technology and ab initio simulation. This knowledge base system is to be called the nanoelectronics innovation platform (NIP). Using NIP, demonstrational research based on the creative ideas produced by universities, industry and independent research institutions will be performed and the possibility of further development will be assessed, leading to full scale research and development.

I hope that this pamphlet will be of help to the nation's semiconductor research.