Towards an Integrated Strategy to Preserve Digital Computing Performance Scaling Using Emerging Technologies

With the decline and eventual end of historical rates of lithographic scaling, we arrive at a crossroad where synergistic and holistic decisions are required to preserve Moore’s law technology scaling. Numerous emerging technologies aim to extend digital electronics scaling of performance, energy efficiency, and computational power/density, ranging from devices (transistors), memories, 3D integration capabilities, specialized architectures, photonics, and others. The wide range of technology options creates the need for an integrated strategy to understand the impact of these emerging technologies on future large-scale digital systems for diverse application requirements and optimization metrics. In this paper, we argue for a comprehensive methodology that spans the different levels of abstraction – from materials, to devices, to complex digital systems and applications. Our approach integrates compact models of low-level characteristics of the emerging technologies to inform higher-level simulation models to evaluate their responsiveness to application requirements. The integrated framework can then automate the search for an optimal architecture using available emerging technologies to maximize a targeted optimization metric.