Engineering Frontier Science Talk

The semiconductor technology is currently at pace to reach the limits of what’s physically possible to build in the next 5-10 years. From planer transistors until the '90s to 3D-FinFETs in the first decade and half of the 21st century to the latest Gate All Around (GAA) technology using 3D FinFETs with nano-sheets - Samsung’s MBCFETs and Intel’s RibbonFETs with Power-VIAs, we’re now approaching a dead-end that demands new ideas to manufacture a new class of transistors. At the same time, Quantum computers have moved from research labs to being used by enterprise customers (presently at a much smaller scale compared to digital computers). While at the moment, QCs are in their infancy, they will be leading the scientific and technological advancements in the decades to come as they project quantum supremacy for the specific class of problems they’re designed to tackle. Then came Generative AI with Pre-trained Transformers like GPT4 by OpenAI. These new ML algorithms have taken the world by surprise. It seems to indicate that it is more likely that we might reach AGI in our lifetime. The amount of computing (and as a consequence the amount of energy resources) the Foundation Models and the LLMs for these GenAI tools demand out-pace any other technology that humans have created until now. In this talk we will discuss the Convergence of these three major advancements in Science and Technology to tackle the problems of the future, where we’re  headed, and the challenges and roadblocks (scientific, engineering, physical, ethical, and political) we need to address.