More Moore – Nanoscience for Information Technology

For almost 40 years Moore’s Law, the doubling of the number of transistors on a single chip every 18 to 24 months, has driven the semiconductor and information technology. Is the end in sight or will there be more of Moore’s Law? Scientists in the Research Laboratories of IBM and elsewhere are trying to push Moore’s Law to the ultimate limit, i.e. atomic and molecular levels. What is the current status of this research and are there potential alternatives?

Presenter(s)

Dr. Hans J. Coufal is currently Manager of Device and Systems Innovation and of the Science and Technology Strategy in the IBM Research Division and the founding director of the Nanoelectronics Research Corporation.

He earned his degrees in Applied Physics from the Technische Hochschule in Munich, Fed. Rep. of Germany. After serving as junior faculty at the same university and the Freie Universitaet in Berlin, he joined the staff at the IBM San Jose Research Laboratory, the precursor of the Almaden Research Center, in 1981. In addition to his own scientific work on thermal and acoustic transients and in the area of holographic data storage he has held several management positions; most recently he served as manager of Science and Technology at the Almaden Research Center. He has published more than 150 scientific publications, is editor of 9 books and holds 14 patents. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, a Fellow of the American Physical Society of America and a Fellow of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, and is the recipient of the Bundesverdienstkreuz, the German counterpart of the Order of Merit.