ISSCC is in its 72nd year as a flagship conference for solid-state circuit design. ISSCC promotes and shares new circuit ideas with the potential to advance the state-of-the-art in IC design and provide new system capabilities. This year’s conference theme highlights how today’s circuit research and development can contribute to the solid-state foundation upon which Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly evolving and pervasively entering people’s lives.

INNOVATIVE SUBMISSIONS

More than ever, ISSCC attendees want to see innovative contributions (e.g., novel circuit and system architectures) in both established and emerging fields of IC and SoC designs. Although some innovative works may not have a best-in-class metric, these contributions explore new circuit and system architectures that may approach problems from a unique perspective, challenge fundamental tradeoffs, or even open up new directions for future research and products. The ISSCC committee of expert technical reviewers are seeking excellent examples of innovation in IC and SoC designs to form the ISSCC technical program.

Innovative and original papers are solicited in subject areas including (but not limited to) the following:

ANALOG: Circuits with analog-dominated innovation; amplifiers, comparators, oscillators, filters, references; nonlinear analog circuits; digitally assisted analog circuits; sensor interface circuits; MEMS sensor/actuator interfaces, analog circuits in sub-10nm scaled technologies.

DATA CONVERTERS: Nyquist-rate and oversampling A/D and D/A converters; embedded and application-specific A/D and D/A converters; time-to-digital converters; innovative and emerging converter architectures.

DIGITAL CIRCUITS and ARCHITECTURES & SYSTEMS*: Digital circuits, architectures, building blocks, and complete systems (monolithic, chiplets, 2.5D, and 3D) for microprocessors, micro-controllers, application processors, graphics processors, automotive processors, processors for machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), and system-on-chip (SoC) processors. Digital systems and accelerators for communications, video and multimedia, annealing, optimization problem solving, reconfigurable systems, near- and sub-threshold systems, and emerging applications. Digital circuits for intra-chip communication, clock distribution, soft-error and variation-tolerant design, power management (e.g., voltage regulators, adaptive digital circuits, digital sensors), and digital clocking circuits (e.g., PLLs, DLLs) for processors. Digital ML/AI systems and circuits, including near-memory and in-memory computation and hardware optimizations for new ML models such as transformers, graph and spiking neural networks, and hyper-dimensional computing.

IMAGERS, MEDICAL, & DISPLAYS: Image sensors; vision sensors and event-based vision sensors; automotive, LIDAR; ultrasound and medical imaging; wearable, implantable, ingestible devices; biomedical sensors and SoCs, neural interfaces and closed-loop systems; medical devices; microarrays; body area networks and body coupled communication; machine learning and edge computing for medical and imaging applications; display drivers, touch sensing; haptic displays; interactive display and sensing technologies for AR/VR.

MEMORY: Static, dynamic, and non-volatile memories for stand-alone and embedded applications; memory/SSD controllers; high-bandwidth I/O interfaces for memories; memories based on phase-change, magnetic, spin-transfer-torque, ferroelectric, and resistive materials; array architectures and circuits to improve low-voltage operation, power reduction, reliability, performance improvement and fault tolerance; application-specific circuit enhancements within the memory subsystem, in-memory-computing or near-memory-computing macros for AI or other applications.

POWER MANAGEMENT: Power management, power delivery, and control circuits; switched-mode power converter ICs using inductive, capacitive, and hybrid techniques; LDO/linear regulators; gate drivers; wide-bandgap (GaN/SiC); isolated and wireless power converters; envelope supply modulators; energy harvesting circuits and systems; robust power management circuits for automotive and other harsh environments; LED drivers.

RF CIRCUITS and WIRELESS SYSTEMS**: Complete solutions and building blocks at RF, mm-Wave and THz frequencies for receivers, transmitters, frequency synthesizers, RF filters, transceivers, SoCs, and wireless SiPs incorporating multiple chiplets. Innovative circuits, systems, design techniques, heterogeneous packaging solutions, etc. for established wireless standards as well as future systems or novel applications, such as sensing, radar, and imaging, and those improving spectral and energy efficiency.

SECURITY: Chips demonstrating cryptographic accelerators (e.g., encryption, light-weight crypto, post-quantum crypto, privacy-preserving compute, blockchain), smart card security, trusted/confidential computing, security circuits (e.g., PUFs, TRNGs, side-channel and fault attack countermeasures, circuits and sensors for attack detection and prevention), security for resource-constrained systems, secure micro-processors, secure memories, analog/mixed-signal circuit security (e.g., secure ADC/DAC, RF, sensors), secure supply chains (e.g., hardware trojan countermeasures, trusted microelectronics), security for/with emerging technologies, and core circuit-level techniques for logical/physical-level security.

TECHNOLOGY DIRECTIONS: Emerging and novel IC, system, and device solutions in various areas such as integrated photonics, silicon electronics-photonics integration; quantum devices for metrology, sensing, computing, etc.; flexible, stretchable, foldable, printable, and 3D electronic systems; biomedical sensors for cellular and molecular targets; wireless power transfer at-distance (e.g., RF and mm-wave, optical, ultrasonic); ICs for space applications and other harsh environments; novel platforms for non-CMOS computing and machine learning; integrated meta-materials, circuits in alternative device platforms (e.g., carbon, organic, superconductor, spin, etc.).

WIRELINE: Receivers/transmitters/transceivers for wireline systems, including backplane transceivers, copper-cable links, chip-to-chip communications, 2.5/3D interconnect, on-chip/on-package links, high-speed interfaces for memory; optical links, and silicon photonics; exploratory I/O circuits for advancing data rates, bandwidth density, power efficiency, equalization, robustness, adaptation capability, and design methodology; building blocks for wireline transceivers (including but not limited to AGCs, analog frontends, ADC/DAC/DSPs, TIAs, equalizers, clock generation and distribution circuits including PLLs/DLLs, clock recovery, line drivers, and hybrids).