Everything Goes Up! Top Trends of 2024

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Three hot technologies are leading the way in continuing the Moore's Law performance increases that can no longer be achieved by transistor scaling alone.

allaboutcircuits.com, Dec. 23, 2024 – 

In 2023, we identified AI, led by ChatGPT, as the top trend. The electronics industry put AI into everything from processors to edge IoT chips to EDA tools. If you haven't noticed, that trend hasn't slowed down at all.

Within our team, we discussed the major growth in electronics for automotive applications, SiC and GaN, RISC-V, quantum computing, and more. None of those would be wrong answers to the question of what was hot in 2024. But, I am choosing to highlight three often interrelated trends that exploded this past year:

• Chiplets
• Stacked high-bandwidth memory
• Photonics

How are these related, you might ask. Well, traditional Moore's Law scaling is finally reaching physical limits. Sure, I am old enough to remember those supposed limits being discussed when transistor gate lengths were 250 nm, or 100x longer than they are today. But, this time we really mean it, probably.

Today, Moore's Law performance increases are not driven by transistor scaling in the x- and y-dimensions. Instead, it comes primarily from these three technologies that also enable integration in the z-dimension for additional performance improvements.

So, let's take a brief look at these hot technologies and some of our coverage from 2024. You can click on the images to read the full articles.

Chiplets

Chip designers and silicon process development engineers have long struggled with the inability to create the perfect process. One that would support high-frequency logic, high-density memories, analog circuits, high-voltage devices, efficient power routing, and more.

With chiplets, designers can mix and match different technologies while optimizing system performance, yield, and cost. In addition, as chiplets are used to enable chip stacking, additional power and performance improvements become possible. As you can see in the following articles, chip giants like AMD, Broadcom, Intel, and EDA leaders like Synopsys, Siemens, and Cadence were heavily involved in chiplet R&D.

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