Breakfast Bytes Blogs

The big event for semiconductor process news is IEDM, the International Electron Devices Meeting. This year it will take place from December 11 to 15 at its usual location, the San Francisco Hilton Hotel as an in-person event. Then on-demand access to the material will be available starting December 17. This will be the 67th IEDM, which explains its slightly odd name—when IEDM started, electronics was about vacuum tubes and transistors were an afterthought banished to a single session on the final afternoon.

This year’s theme is “Devices for a New Era of Electronics: From 2D Materials to 3D Architectures,” chosen to reflect two powerful industry trends: the use of so-called 2D materials (having thicknesses measured in atoms) in order to further miniaturize transistors, and the use of a variety of 3D architectures to incorporate more features and performance from the device to the chip to the package.

This year the IEEE IEDM conference features a rich collection of presentations on topics that are on everyone’s minds. Among them are the advent of 2D materials, the growing number and diversity of 3D architectural concepts, the rise of system/technology co-optimization, and the possible end of Moore’s Law. Breakthroughs in these and other areas will be presented and discussed, and ultimately will help the industry and society as a whole move forward.

As usual, the conference starts on Saturday afternoon with tutorials, then on Sunday there will be short courses, a plenary session on Monday, and then about a dozen parallel tracks of technical papers for the rest of the week. Everything will be available on demand once the conference is over starting on December 17.

Tutorials

The tutorials are on the afternoon of Saturday, December 11.

2:45pm to 4:15pm:

• Beyond FINFET era: Challenges and opportunities for CMOS technology, Kai Zhao, IBM
• TCAD based DTCO and STCO, Asen Asenov, University of Glasgow
• 6G Technology Challenges from devices to wireless systems, Aarno Pärssinen, Oulu University

4:30pm to 6:00pm:

• Selective and Atomic Scale Processes for Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing, Robert Clark, TEL
• Machine Learning for Semiconductor Device and Circuit Modeling, Elyse Rosenbaum, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• GaN Power Device Technology and Reliability, Dong Seup Lee, Texas Instruments

Short Courses

The short courses run in parallel on Sunday December 12 from 9:00am to 5:30pm. Historically, one of the courses has been on logic processes and one on memory, but this year one course covers scaling and integration, and the other covers low-power AI at the edge.

Short Course 1: Future Scaling and Integration Technology (organizer: Dechao Guo, IBM Research):

• Processes and Materials Engineering Innovations for Advanced Logic Transistor Scaling, Benjamin Colombeau, Applied Materials
• Interconnect Resistivity: New Materials, Daniel Gall, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
• Metrology and Material Characterization for the Era of 3D Logic and Memory, Roy Koret, Nova Ltd.
• Beyond FinFET Devices: GAA, CFET, 2D Material FET, Chung-Hsun Lin, Intel
• Heterogenous Integration Using Chiplets & Advanced Packaging, Madhavan Swaminathan, Georgia Tech
• Design-Technology Co-Optimization / System-Technology Co-Optimization, Victor Moroz, Synopsys

Short Course 2: Emerging Technologies for Low-Power Edge Computing (organizers: Huaqiang Wu, Tsinghua University and John Paul Strachan, Forschungszentrum Jülich):

• Mobile NPUs for Intelligent Human Computer Interaction, Hoi-Jun Yoo, KAIST
• Brain-inspired strategies for optimizing the design of neuromorphic sensory-processing systems, Giacomo Indiveri, University of Zurich
• Memory based AI and Data Analytics solutions, Euicheol Lim, SK Hynix
• Material strategies for memristor-based AI hardware and their heterointegration, Jeehwan Kim, MIT
• RRAM devices for data storage and in-memory computing, Wei Lu, University of Michigan
• Practical implementation of wireless power transfer, Hubregt Visser, imec

Plenary Session

• The Smallest Engine Transforming Humanity: The Past, Present, and Future, Kinam Kim, Vice Chairman & CEO, Head of Samsung Electronics Device Solutions Division, Samsung
• Creating the Future: Augmented Reality, the Next Human-Machine Interface,  Michael Abrash, Chief Scientist at Facebook Reality Labs, Facebook 
• Quantum Computing Technology, Heike Riel, IBM Fellow and the Head of the Science & Technology Department at IBM Research, IBM Zurich

Selected Technical Highlights

• A Stretchable Amplifier for Smart Textiles, from a Tsinghua University-led team
• 3D at the Device Level, from IBM and Samsung
• GaN Meets Moore’s Law, from Intel
• GaN at Up to 10 kV, from a Virginia Tech-led team
• Record FeRAM Performance for Embedded Memory, from Intel
• Record Quantum Efficiency for NIR/SWIR Sensors, from STMicroelectronics
• A Marriage of Photonics and Terahertz Electronics, from Osaka University
• Five Focus Sessions in areas of intense research interest
  • Device Technology for Quantum Computing
  • Stacking of Devices, Circuits, Chips
  • STCO for Memory-Centric Computing and 3D Integration
  • Topological Materials, Devices and Systems
  • Technologies for AR/VR and Intelligent Sensors)

Learn More

See the IEDM website.

Sign up for Sunday Brunch, the weekly Breakfast Bytes email.

.