Preface to Focus Topic on Integrated Circuits, Technologies and Applications (ICTA) 2025
Authors: Yan Lu, Sai-Weng Sin
This Special Topic of the Journal of Semiconductors (JoS) features expanded versions of key articles presented at the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Integrated Circuits Technologies and Applications (ICTA), held in Macao, China, from October 22 to 24, 2025. IEEE ICTA is an IEEE flagship conference in the field of integrated circuits (IC) in China, providing a communication platform for sharing state-of-the-art techniques from experts in the field of ICs. Among the 146 papers presented at ICTA 2025, the Technical Program Committee and the Award Committee selected 3 high-quality articles for recommendation to the Special Topic of JoS, covering the technical fields of RF, medical neural interface, and vision sensing ICs. The first article, from Zhejiang University, introduces a fractional-N dual-path SPD/PFD PLL with a complementary digital-to-time converter (DTC) pair for DTC range reduction and INL cancellation, achieving 118 fs RMS jitter and -247.5 dB figure-of-merit in 7 nm FinFET. The second article, also from Zhejiang University, presents a battery-free neural interface with dual-overlapped on-chip antennas, enabling high-data-rate backscatter for 72-channel simultaneous recording, achieving 18 Mbps backscatter data rate in 65 nm CMOS. The third article, from the Southern University of Science and Technology, describes a cascadable stereo matching processor with a scalable semi-global matching algorithm, achieving speedups of up to 178x and 97x over CPU and Edge GPU platforms, respectively, with an energy efficiency of 7.9 pJ/pixel in 40-nm CMOS.
