Recently, CMOS downsizing has been accelerated very aggressively in both production and research level, and even transistor operation of a 6 nm gate length p-channel MOSFET was reported in a conference. However, many serious problems are expected for implementing such small-geometry MOSFETs into large scale integrated circuits, and it is still questionable whether we can successfully introduce sub-10 nm CMOS LSIs into the market or not. In this paper, limitation and its possible causes for the downscaling of CMOS towards sub-10 nm are discussed with consideration of past CMOS predictions for the limitation. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.