Limits of micro-electronics

Inaugural lecture--Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Rand Afrikaans University, 28 October 1982@@Micro-electronics, in contributing to our very survival, has become an essential part of our civilization. The extraordinary advances made in this field bring to light certain limits, of which will be discussed: • social limits, • testing limits, • technical and economic limits, • physical limits. It will be shown that, concerning the proper use of micro-electronics, social limits are mainly an educational problem of fundamental importance to our life as a whole. Current economic, technical and physical limits are discussed in terms of those limits which can be overcome in the search for new solutions and of those which are believed to be absolute. The former are technical limits mainly based on the imperfection of the methods in scaling down devices. The latter are laid down by nature and cannot be surmounted, such as for instance, the absolute value of the velocity of light.