Through the Looking Glass -- The 2017 Edition: Trends in Solid-State Circuits from ISSCC

The International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) is the flagship conference of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society. This year, the theme for ISSCC 2017 is "Intelligent Chips for a Smart World." Advances in solid-state circuits and systems continue to propel the ongoing fusion between the physical and virtual worlds. With the resulting growth in sensor deployment, data traffic, and data-center workloads, future systems must employ "intelligent" chips at all levels of the system stack to improve the efficiency at which we acquire, network, store, and process information. Modern applications centered around the Internet of Everything (IoE) and real-time data analytics are driving circuit and system designers toward new ways of leveraging the immense device density and processing power of modern technology. ISSCC covers a spectrum of design approaches in various technical areas and advances, broadly categorized as analog systems, analog-to-digital data-conversion systems, communication systems, digital systems, and innovative topics such as micromachines and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), imagers, sensors, and biomedical devices, as well as forward-looking solutions that may be several years away from becoming commercial. The ten ISSCC technical subcommittees annually update their analyses of industry trends for the benefit of the community at large. This article summarizes some of these views in selected technical areas.