Shift of paradigms in microelectronics

Summary form only given. There are two ways to speculate professionally about the long term prognosis for the microelectronics industry. One is to intelligently extrapolate the future from the solid ground of the present day. A second method is strategic visioning, which implies scenario techniques to envision the distant future and retropolate from there adequate measures to make the predictions become true. Both prognostic methods are applied to predict the most likely future of the various disciplines of microelectronics. This results in statements with regard to the validity range of conventional (extrapolative) thinking and likewise indicates the most likely reality in the distant future (e.g. 2015, 2020). This paper provides basic discipline-specific results for materials, processing, devices, circuits, chip systems (circuits, algorithms, architectures), software tools, and testing