The Rationale and Paradigm of "More than Moore"

For several decades, microelectronic industries and relevant academic communities have been spending tremendous effort in developing and commercializing the Moore's law, leading to not only many breakthroughs and revolution in ICT, but also noticeable changes in the way of living of human beings. While this trend will still be valid, pushing microelectronics to the nanoelectronic era, in recent years, there are ever-increasing awareness, R&D effort and business drivers to speed up the development and application of "More than Moore" that are based upon or derived from silicon technologies but do not scale with Moore's law (with typical examples as RF, Power/HV, Sensor/Actuator/MEMS, SiP, SSL, ets.). The future business opportunities and technology challenges will be the innovations and effective integration of Moore's law focusing mainly on digital function with MtM focusing mainly on non-digital function and heterogeneous integration. Starting from the rational of MtM, this paper will highlight some strategic research issues of sensors and actuators within the technology domain MtM. Some issues related to the paradigm of MtM, covering industrial vision, strategy and business models, will also be discussed.