State of the art in microfabrication

In this review paper the state of the art in microfabrication is presented. The focus is on trends in integrated circuit fabrication by mainstream industrial players. The article starts with Moore’s Law, describing its inception as well as the evolution of Moore’s metric of the number of components per chip until today. Then, the main trends in manufacturing and in contemporary research are sketched, for CMOS integrated circuits, memory chips, and other planar technologies. The field is rapidly expanding beyond silicon for future microelectronic devices, fired by market demands in various fields such as LED lighting, photovoltaic systems and power electronics. Emerging semiconductor materials are reviewed in the perspective of radiation detection potential in the final section