ISSCC International Solid State Circuit Conference, known as the integrated circuit and semiconductor field “Olympics”, gathered the world’s top most cutting-edge semiconductor field related to breakthroughs and progress.
The 70th ISSCC conference will be held in San Francisco on February 19, more than 3,000 researchers from more than 30 countries and regions will participate in the conference, such as Samsung, SK Hynix, TSMC, MediaTek, Sony, Intel and other companies and universities.
ISSCC committee member Jaehyouk Choi, a professor at KAIST, said the ISSCC took into account the practicality and commercial viability of the proposed technologies, and that more than half of the participants were chip companies.
The technologies that will be presented at the conference were officially introduced at the ISSCC’s previous preliminary press conference held in Korea last week.
ISSCC 2023 received a total of 629 papers, of which only 198 passed the screening process, covering various technologies such as analog, and digital converters, digital architectures and systems, digital circuits, IMDD, RF, wireless, wired, and memory.
Of the 198 papers, 32 are from Korea; 59 are from China and 42 are from the United States. For the first time, the number of papers from mainland China surpassed the U.S. and South Korea to rank first. Officials said the quality of papers submitted by Chinese scholars in ISSCC 2023 was outstanding, covering a variety of topics from machine learning to processors.
TheLec reports that Samsung, as a company, was selected for a full eight papers, making it the single commercial company with the highest number of accepted papers, despite only accounting for half of the 16 papers they submitted.
One of the hot areas of ISSCC 2023 was power management ICs, which accounted for 12 percent of the selected papers, according to the report. South Korea, however, did not have a single paper on the subject, and KAIST professor Min-Kyu Je said in a presentation at the prep session that the country lags behind the global average in areas such as gallium nitride and power transfer devices.
In this regard, several universities in Greater China account for the largest percentage of power management IC papers, and they are also advanced in research on IoT data converters. As of now, a total of 15 DC-related papers will be presented at ISSCC 2023, 11 of which are from China (including Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan).
In terms of digital architectures and systems, AMD and MediaTek are expected to showcase their latest 5nm and 4nm processors.
Ji-Hoon Kim, a professor at Ewha Woman’s University, said research on IoT systems related to high-performance processors, mobile application processors, automobiles and energy harvesting is very active. There is also reported research on 5nm and 4nm-based 3D stacking and direct bonding packaging technologies.
Of course, each country has areas of expertise, for example, Korea is the strongest in the area of image sensors and display driver ICs. 9 of the 18 papers accepted for ISSCC 2023 in this category are from Korea.
In addition, Samsung will also submit a paper on quad-pixel 50MP CMOS image sensors and display driver ICs for 8K TVs and gaming displays. Meanwhile, Korea also has a strong presence in the memory chip category, which accounts for 11 percent of the total accepted papers and is the second largest category after power management ICs.
SK Hynix reportedly plans to demonstrate its V-NAND technology with more than 300 layers.
Elsewhere, nine papers related to SRAM CIM were also selected, mostly from China (including Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan), and these studies focused on applications in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
