Date: 27/02/2012

Semiconductor technology trends in 2012 at ISSCC

At this year's International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), quite interesting technologies were presented which can enhance human life further. Here below we provide some of the interesting developments in semiconductor device, what also called as solid-state device!

Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) and UT Dallas have announced research results that show circuits operating at the terahertz (THz) range can be affordably manufactured in complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) silicon. Cost for producing THz systems down from hundreds of thousands of dollars to only a few hundred dollars, says Professor Ken O, lead researcher for SRC's program at UT Dallas.

SRC also in partnership with Columbia University has developed voltage regulators connected to other devices using silicon interposer technology.

Intel has presented a power saving tech where the MOSFETs inside processors switch at near threshold voltages to save power at light-processing loads. The idea is to make the processor work at low-voltage and low-power but at low-speed at lesser processing load, but when the need of fast crunching of data arrives, the processor shift to high voltage and high speed, its like shifting gears in cars.

The focus now in processor design is in achieving more MIPS per watt. The research trend is super-computer consuming few Kilo Watts of power should able to do the same in few 10s of watts. It's all about 100x and 10x reduction in power. A portable PV solar panel should be able to power the future mobile computing devices.

Not only in processors, in every device the power-smartness is becoming must, the radio which wake-up only when the transmitting or receiving is required, was presented by Korean engineers.

While this is about power consumption, the size trend is also opening new applications for micron size silicon devices. Chip packing a processor and sensor is made measuring very small in size, that can swim through the blood vessel of humans to diagnose and also treat for medical conditions. Stanford University's assistant professor Ada Poon, who is also a principal investigator of the Poon Research Group has published a paper titled "Miniaturization of Implantable Wireless Power Receiver", where the tiny chip inside human body get the power through electromagnetics without getting absorbed by tissues.

Things presented at ISSCC which have immediate market impact:

Quad core processors for smartphones and tablets is now a reality, Samsung is reported to have demonstrated its ARM Cortex 9 based SoC at ISSCC.

Sony demonstrated operation of the wireless data transfer device at the ISSCC transferring data at the speeds of 350Mb/s transmission speed and is aimed at various mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets.

The tricky RF and processor logic can be now fabricated in single chip Intel has presented its new Atom processor with on-chip WiFi radio.

Interesting presentation from imec was on configurable radios by using innovative ADC architecture, imec also presented 60GHz transceiver chip made using 40nm process.

In memory area, Chinese researchers could use 16 core CPU which use massage passing scheme instead of shared memory architecture. In non-volatile space the magnetic hard-disk may completely vanish by 2020 not just by flash alone, but also by other non-volatile chip technologies. Sandisk and its chip fab partner Toshiba could show 128Gb flash chip on a 170 square mm silicon.
Samsung and Hynix are reported to have demonstrated DDR4 at ISSCC, however DDR4 is expected to be popular in early 2014.

Among all these most interesting was the device, which can swim through blood but is powered externally. Read more by visiting the link below:
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/february/micro-device-implant-022212.html