IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Winter 2022 - 63

elements across multiple dielets interacting
with low-BER channels.
We see a continued push in application-processor
performance and
efficiency along with video, display,
and camera capabilities to fully leverage
the ubiquitous connectivity that
smartphones provide (Figure 17).
There are also major innovation efforts
in 5G, AI, and gaming. 5G cellular
technology is becoming more mature,
and the post-5G era is gaining more
focus. The 6G era will feature more
antennas, intelligence, and use cases.
The range of applications of neural
network processing units (NPUs) is
gradually expanding beyond image
and speech recognition to cellular
performance improvement and system-on-chip
(SoC) power and performance
optimization. Therefore, the
performance of the NPU is increasing
at the same time that tiny NPUs for
low-power operations are being applied
everywhere. For a better user
experience and game quality, the
main concern surrounding the display
is moving from resolution to the
frame rate.
The bandwidth of wired and wireless
links continues to increase at a
rate of approximately 10´ higher data
rates every five years (Figure 18).
Compared to previous years, the
changes in 2022 are modest. Massive
multiple-input/multiple-output
and
mm-wave technologies are being actively
studied to realize full 5G communication.
5G mobile devices have
become mainstream, with maximum
data rates reaching 10 Gb/s. The explosion
of Internet-of-Everything (IoE)
devices will require the evolution of
narrowband wide-area networks.
Circuits for Hardware Security
With the increasing risk and cost of
information theft and safety hazards,
hardware security has become
a common requirement in intelligent
and connected systems. Although
the focus on cryptographic implementation
continues, cost-effective
and low-BER physically unclonable
functions (PUFs) are increasingly adopted
in smart cards, sensor nodes,
consumer devices, and automotive
applications. True random number
generators (TRNGs) are also commonly
required to strengthen secret
key generation in cryptographic applications.
Techniques to counteract
side-channel attacks are enabling
higher levels of security at lower design
costs, thanks to the higher degree
of design reuse and more digital
circuit techniques. Quantum computers
enable dramatic speed-ups in
attacks on existing public key algorithms.
Standardization bodies, such
as the National Institute for Standards
and Technology, have started competitions
to identify potential postquantum
cryptographic (PQC) schemes.
Novel PQC accelerators are being designed
to efficiently and securely implement
these schemes in hardware.
Figure 19 illustrates trends in area
scaling in PUFs (area/bit) and TRNGs
published recently at ISSCC, showing
relentless area and cost reductions.
Figure 20 presents the energy/bit
scaling in PUFs published at ISSCC
and the relatively higher energy/bit
of TRNGs. The sudden PUF energy
increase of three years ago is attributable
to the stronger emphasis on
low-BERs. Figure 21 illustrates the
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FIGURE 15: The chip complexity scaling trends (a red diamond designates a multichip module).
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FIGURE 16: The on-die cache size trends (a red diamond designates a multichip module).
IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE WINTER 2022
63
Cache Size (MB)
Transistor Count (Millions)
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IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Winter 2022

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