ABSTRACT
Recently, information technology (IT)—such as Internet, i-mode, cellular phone, and car navigationhas spread very rapidly all over of the world. IT is expected to dramatically raise the efficiency of our society and greatly improve the quality of our life. It should be noted that the progress of IT entirely owes to that of semiconductor technology, especially Silicon LSIs (Large Scale Integrated Circuits). Silicon LSIs provide us high speed/frequency operation of tremendously many functions with low cost, low power, small size, small weight, and high reliability. In these 30 years, the gate length of the metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistors (MOSFETs) has reduced 100 times, the density of DRAM increased 500,000 times, and clock frequency of MPU increased 2,500 times, as shown in Table 1.1. Without such a marvelous progress of LSI technologies, today’s great success in information technology would not be realized at all.
