ISSCC 2023

Imec at the 2023 International Solid-State Circuits Conference

Imec will be present at the 2023 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) with 7 papers, of which 3 invited. Imec will present a novel phase-locked loop that enables fast generation of high-quality frequency-modulated signals relevant for 140GHz radar applications. Other papers cover a novel low-power electrochemical sensor interface IC for in-situ bioreactor monitoring, look into promising prospects of 2D materials for application in both analog and digital circuits and a wireless telemetry for neuro-interfaces, inspired by biological neurons.

Next to that, Jo De Boeck, Chief Strategy Officer at imec, is invited to present at the plenary session, where he will discuss how the EU Chips Act will act as a driver for pan-European full-stack innovation partnerships. He will join the panel with industry experts from Meta, Intel and Texas Instruments discussing “The Path to Sustainable IC Ecosystems”.

The 2023 ISSCC Program Chair is Piet Wambacq, fellow at imec and part-time professor at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. 

Ingrid Verbauwhede, professor at the ESAT-COSIC lab, a research lab of KU Leuven in association with imec, has received the IEEE Donald O. Pederson Solid-State Circuits Award for pioneering contributions to energy-efficient and high-performance secure integrated circuits and systems. The award will be presented at the 2023 ISSCC. 

Program Overview

19 February

Session: Transceivers for Exascale: Towards Tbps/mm and sub-pJ/bit
Time: 1:40 PM
Title and speaker: Electronics and Photonics for Beyond 200G Capable Transceivers Peter Ossieur, imec, Ghent, Belgium

Scaling wireline transceivers beyond 200G capacities will require close co-development of high-speed electronics and photonics integrated circuits. In this talk, examples of both electronic and photonic integrated circuits with a view to extend electro-optic bandwidth far beyond 50GHz as necessary for 200G transmission will be provided. Co-development of conventional photonics and electronics circuits will be addressed, however this only gets us this far. Hence, in addition it will be shown how transceiver functionality such as equalization can also be shifted into the optical domain, creating additional degrees of freedom that allow to better select optimum transceiver topologies with improved performance (e.g. higher bandwidth), reduced power consumption.

20 February

Title: EU Chips Act Drives Pan-European Full-Stack
Time: 10:40 AM
Speaker: Innovation Partnerships Jo De Boeck, Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer, imec & KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

In every aspect of our life and society, semiconductors play a major role. The pandemic in conjunction with supply chain hiccups and geopolitical tensions made all regions realize that they need to revisit their presence in the semiconductor value chain. The European Commission projected the ambition of achieving a 20% share of the global semiconductor production by 2030. Europe can leverage existing strengths such as, among others, the unique position of equipment companies and leadership positions in 300mm semiconductor technology R&D. The Chips-for-Europe initiative will invest in pilot lines and ecosystems for chip manufacturing, embracing leading-edge and first-of-a-kind technologies. The pilot lines will allow early exploration of the potential impact of new technology features in advanced chip and system architectures. This will trigger increased demand and accelerate industrial uptake of the novel technologies. This type of innovation loop is also essential for deep-tech start-ups building their unique value proposition. The full-stack, networked model of industry collaboration is at the core of the EU Chips Act ambition and will impact different application domains such as heterogeneous cloud and distributed computing, connectivity, automotive, and health. It is crucial for all this innovation potential that we, as an industry, consider that semiconductor manufacturing is resource-intensive with respect to energy, water, chemicals, and raw materials. Design technology co-optimization (DTCO) and System-Technology co-optimization (STCO) methodologies can develop a framework for early sustainability assessments of logic technologies. Finally, we urgently need to get the message across that climate, health, safety, and human connectedness all require complex digital backbones, if we want to stand a chance of attracting the right talent.

Session:  Frequency Synthesizers
Time: 1:30 PM
Title and speaker:  A 16GHz, 41kHzrms Frequency Error, Background-Calibrated, Duty-Cycled FMCW Charge-Pump PLL P. T. Renukaswamy, K. Vaesen, N. Markulic , V. Derudder , D-W. Park  , P. Wambacq, J. Craninckx imec, Heverlee, Belgium Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium

Session: The Path to Sustainable IC Ecosystems
Time: 8:00 PM
Panelists: Carole-Jean Wu, Meta, Cambridge, MA - Yogesh Ramadass, Texas Instruments, Santa Clara, CA - Marcus Pan, SRC, Durham, NC - Todd Brady, Intel, Chandler, AZ - Jo De Boeck, imec, Leuven, Belgium - Andreia Cathelin, STMicroelectronics, Crolles, France

Sustainability has become a major concern in our lives in general, and all the way to IC design. It widened from energy management to include greenhouse gas emissions and pressure on natural resources all along the product lifecycle. These challenges must be taken into account early in product design phases, to rethink system architecture and circuit techniques to favor frugality and reuse and minimize the impact of manufacturing. A deep restructuration of the IC ecosystem to integrate eco-design and reuse will need to arise, either from top-down political intervention or company-driven initiatives. How do we facilitate an economically viable path to sustainable IC ecosystem? Will this come from market incentives or are government regulations required? With a growing awareness of this challenge, several initiatives have already emerged for sustainable electronics, coming from research labs, companies, citizens, or governments. This panel confronts these approaches and explores their potential to create this economy viable path via market incentive or government regulation, for a sustainable value chain all over the product lifecycle. 

21 February

Session: Emerging Sensing Systems and IOT
Time: 3:45 PM
Title and speaker:  A 22 μW Peak Power Multimodal Electrochemical Sensor Interface IC for Bioreactor Monitoring Q. Lin , W. Sijbers , C. Avdikou , D. Gomez, D. Biswas , S. Sneha, A. Malissovas , B. Tacca , N. V. Helleputte imec, Leuven, Belgium Now with MPS Spain, Barcelona, Spain imec - Holst Centre, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

22 February

Time: 11:15 AM
Session: Innovations from Outside the (ISSCC) Box
Title and speaker: The Promise of 2-D Materials for Scaled Digital and Analog Applications D. Verreck, P. Wambacq, M. Van de Put, Z. Ahmed, Q. Smets, A. Afzalian, R. Duflou, X. Wu, G. Mirabelli, R. Chen, I. Asselberghs, G. Sankar Kar imec, Leuven, Belgium

Session: Intelligent Biomedical Circuits and Systems
Time: 3:45 PM
Title and speaker:  A 384-Channel Online-Spike-Sorting IC Using Unsupervised Geo-OSort Clustering and Achieving 0.0013mm2 /Ch and 1.78μW/Ch Y. Chen, B. Tacca , Y. Chen, D. Biswas1 , G. Gielen, F. Catthoor, M. Verhelst, C. Mora Lopez imec, Leuven, Belgium Fudan University, Shanghai, China KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

February 23

Session: Advanced Circuits and Technologies for Wearable and Implantable Devices
Time: 4:05 PM
Title and speaker: Neuron-Inspired Wireless Telemetry for Implantable Neural Interfaces Yao-Hong Liu, imec, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

“The most complicated object in the known universe is sitting on your shoulder.” Many neural sensing technologies, mostly imaging, have been developed for scientific or therapeutic purposes. With the advancement in semiconductor or flexible technology, high-density intra-cortical micro-electrode arrays (MEAs) enable electrical sensing with sub-millisecond temporal resolution and 10’s of µm spatial resolution. They have become the most widely adopted method in neuroscience experiments and neuro-therapeutics at the moment. However, one of the key challenges yet to overcome, is the lack of a high-bandwidth, miniature and energy-efficient wireless telemetry, which allows neural sensors to be chronically implanted without infection risks. Such high-fidelity neural sensors produce a huge amount of data which need to be wirelessly transferred across layers of tissue without introducing heating, but miniature neural implants have very limited resource to support energy-consuming data transmission. Inspired from biological neurons, the energy consumption for processing and transportation of information can be significantly reduced, if only the changes are processed with a “spike” format and propagated using “ions”.  In this talk, we will discuss how we can be inspired from the way neurons communicate to develop a spiking wireless telemetry for future implantable neural interfaces.

Event details

The International Solid-State Circuits Conference is the foremost global forum for presentation of advances in solid-state circuits and systems-on-a-chip. The Conference offers a unique opportunity for engineers working at the cutting edge of IC design and application to maintain technical currency, and to network with leading experts…

Discover more