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Sensors, wireless and IoT on the rise at ISSCC
Rick Merritt, Feb. 13, 2017 – SAN FRANCISCO - Big processors and fat memories used to dominate the headlines at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). Those chips were still present this year, but increasingly, a groundswell of slim sensors, wireless components, and other devices for the Internet of Things are on the rise here.
The event also hosted a session on embedded processors for deep learning (see pages 9 and 10 of this report). It was a fountain of fresh ideas in architecture for squeezing down the high-performance demands of still-evolving neural networks.
At the lowest end, Imec researcher Kris Myny showed an NFC barcode made up from 1,712 transistors on a plastic substrate (bottom of page).
"This was my pet project," said Myny, who has attended the last nine ISSCC gatherings with increasingly sophisticated examples of his team's work. "For a long time, I wanted to get data from flexible electronics into silicon in devices like smartphones - this year, we showed it's really possible."