Advanced Integrated Circuit Design and Application

Dear Colleagues,

Advanced integrated circuits (ICs) are the keystones of modern electronics, playing a significant role in enabling the development of increasingly powerful, efficient, and versatile electronic devices and systems that renovate our living styles. Among the vast industries and technologies, the application of electronic engineering and IC system design to solve challenges in medical and biological fields has placed this field at the forefront of research and innovation. The potential intersection of biology, medicine, and electrical engineering will have a profound impact on modern healthcare, treatment, and diagnoses of diseases. In addition, owing to the continuous development of smart functional materials and electronics, advanced ICs could be imparted with intelligence and versatile sensory abilities. The ability to build IC systems, especially by combining solid-state electronics with the unique capabilities of bioinspired components, exhibits great promise, along with other innovations in advanced IC designs. The main technical challenges for advanced ICs involve how to construct units with improved performance, lower power consumption, enhanced reliability, smaller footprint, and possibility for new applications. Thus, the developments of emerging IC technologies have been focused on introducing novel device structures, new semiconducting materials, and new architecture to improve performance/integration density and enhance the function of ICs.

We encourage the submissions of original research studies and reviews on novel emerging material technologies—such as zero-dimensional, one-dimensional, two-dimensional, and three-dimensional nanostructured materials; smart and active materials for IC development; flexible thin-film IC designs; IC packaging; smart power ICs; and energy harvesting technologies—and their broad applications in next-generation wearables, health monitoring, as well as touch-sensing and other sensory systems.

Dr. Shoue Chen
Dr. Xiaolong Wang
Dr. Ke Xie
Topic Editors