In 1947, the world’s only transistor sat alone on a bench at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J. Sixty years later, a billion or more transistors routinely share a single chip, trillion-transistor chips are in the offing, and solid-state devices are in just about everything electrical, from flashlights on up. And for more than 50 of those 60 years, engineers have been meeting at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) to gain and share knowledge in the field. The 54th ISSCC, to be held 11 to 15 February 2007 in San Francisco, is one of the most important conferences for presenting cutting-edge IC design.”

Although most of the conference, which is sponsored by the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society, focuses on the latest commercial developments in production or near-production ICs, the conference also seeks out “leading-edge pointers to future developments that are now in an early state of evolution,” conference spokesman Kenneth Smith says.

FOUR DIMENSIONS With solid-state devices ubiquitous, it’s no surprise that the papers, tutorials, forums, and panels will cover a wide range of subjects. The conference’s theme, “The Four Dimensions of IC Innovation,” concerns technology, circuits, system architecture, and devices, but several sessions also cover applications.

A glimpse of sessions topics—including memory (nonvolatile, DRAM, SRAM, and eRAM), sensors, millimeter-wave transceivers, microprocessors, analog-to-digital converters, optical communications, and systems-on-a-chip (SoC)—indicates the field’s diversity.

“There’s a major thrust towards the use of SoCs—complex large mixed-signal chips, some including over a billion transistors—which eliminate the bulk, cost, and speed problems of using external components,” Smith says.

Among the developments to be discussed, according to Jan Van der Spiegel, the conference’s technical program chair, will be an eight-core, power-efficient scalar processor architecture chip (SPARC), which can handle up to 64 programs simultaneously.

“A theme that runs through the conference,” Van der Spiegel says, “is the emphasis on low-power and power-management techniques. In the case of processors, the performance is further optimized through adaptive techniques using active damping circuits, multiple on-chip sensors, and distributed monitor circuits that correct for transistor variations and power-supply droops.”

Chips can now handle extremely high frequencies, including millimeter waves of 30 to 300 gigahertz. “One paper describes an amplifier that works at 100 GHz, though it hasn’t much gain,” Smith says. “That could lead to radar on a single chip—less than 1 centimeter on a side, including the antenna—for security sensing, automotive applications, and robotics.” That kind of device speed can also lead to RFID chips small and thin enough to be built into clothes and paper packaging.

In the fast-growing biomedical field, Smith says, “there’s progress on biologically neutral implants that directly stimulate the nerves for hearing and seeing, based on input from external sensors and processors, and powered by radio waves.” That approach means the end of invasive procedures to replace implanted devices with improved ones. “They’ll only have to do the messy, implantable stuff once, while the parts that get better every year are external and accessible,” he says.

In this digital age, bioelectronics and other disciplines that interact with the real world rely heavily on analog techniques. About a third of the conference, Smith says, is devoted to analog, including data converters and RF.

“Real problems at the leading edge of ever-faster digital chips are really analog. They require analog solutions at very-high frequencies,” he says. Analog techniques are also needed for sensors that track real-world phenomena, for the input and output sections of software-defined radios, for example, and for the low-noise amps that raise weak incoming signal levels high enough for digital circuits to work with them. Even such future-oriented topics as “The Ultimate Limits of Integrated Electronics” and “Circuit Design in the Year 2012,” are likely to have analog aspects. As much as technology’s fast progress owes to digital, it also owes a lot to that first analog transistor.

For more information about the conference, visit http://www.isscc.org/isscc.