"Semiconductor Technology: little room left for innovations?" Moore's law which predicted the doubling of semiconductor chips capacity every 18 months has been in effect for the last 20 years. During this time, the semiconductor industry saw tremendous performance increase and capacity growths which in turn fueled the high tech boom. The demise of Moore's law has been repeatedly predicted in the last decade, but engineering ingenuity was able to "cheat " the anticipated mother nature and enable the industry to march onward according to Moore's law. However, the costs of improving performance and density and of new plants to produce chips utilizing state of the art technology are skyrocketing. Has the time arrived for new and revolutionary technologies for the next generations of devices? New terms such as quantum devices and bio-computing are used to describe futuristic technologies, but how much of it is science and how much is science fiction? In this Silicom Ventures meeting, industry and academia leaders will try to answer these and other relevant questions.

Ron Wilson

Lip-Bu Tan

Lip-Bu Tan is the Founder and Chairman of Walden International, which manages over US $1.6 billion in venture capital funds. He has been active in the venture capital industry for the past two decades. Lip-Bu also introduced and pioneered the U.S. venture capital concept in Asia, and contributed towards the promotion of early-stage technology investing in the Asia-Pacific region. Lip-Bu focuses primarily in industries relating to communications, semiconductor/ components and software. He was responsible for the investment and exits of the several dozens companies either via IPO or M&A among them: Cypress Semiconductor, Integrated Silicon Solution and may more. Lip-Bu currently serves on the Board of Advances Micro-Fabrication Equipment, Ambarella, Beceem Communications, Cadence Design Systems, Creative Technology, Flextronics International, Inphi Corporation, Mindtree Consulting, SINA and SMIC. Lip-Bu is a board member of the National Venture Capital Association, a member of the Committee of 100, a member of the VC Advisory Board of Fabless Semiconductor Association, A trustee of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and a member of both the Dean’s Advisory Council for the School of Engineering and the Visiting Committee for the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Jim Plummer

Jim Plummer is Dean of Engineering and Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Prior to becoming Dean, he was the chair of the EE department at Stanford. He has been on the Stanford faculty since 1978. He received his BSEE degree from UCLA and MS and Ph.D. degrees in EE from Stanford. Dr. Plummer is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the IEEE. The awards he has received for his research include, the 1991 Solid State Science and Technology Award from the Electrochemical Society, the 2001 Semiconductor Industry Association University Research Award and the 2003 IEEE Ebers Award. He has graduated over 80 Ph.D. students with whom he has published more than 400 journal and conference papers. These papers have won 8 conference and student best paper awards. He has also received three teaching awards at Stanford. He serves on the Board of Directors of several public companies including Intel. His primary research interests are in silicon technology and devices. His recent work has focused on nanoscale silicon devices for logic and memory. This work has demonstrated new device concepts including vertical MOSFETs, the T-RAM thyristor memory cell and the IMOS device which achieves < kT/q subthreshold slopes.

J. Christopher Moran