Study on Integrated Circuit Field Based on Hot Topics

Ping Qin

1,2,* a

, Tingting Duan

, Xiao Zhu

, Chen Chen

and Xiaotao Li

1,2 e

Evaluation Center of Industry and Informatization Think Tank of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics,

China

Library of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China

College of Humanities, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 210016, China

Keywords: Integrated Circuits (IC), Topics, Prominence, Netdraw, Nvivo.

Abstract: With the accelerated evolution of a new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial

transformation, integrated circuit disciplines have emerged. How to grasp global research hot topics is an

urgent concern of governments, universities and enterprises. This paper adopts the combination of topic

analysis and policy text analysis. Firstly, it analyzes the research topics of integrated circuit industry chain

and components. According to the topic prominence and development trend, 30 hot topics in the rising trend

are selected, and the national and regional distribution of their research is discussed. Through the tools Nvivo,

the integrated circuit related policies and world-renowned think tank reports were further analyzed.

The

research results show that there are still shortcomings in the research of semiconductor materials, CMOS,

block cipher, operational amplifier and other fields in China, and there is a big gap in EDA design software.

In the future, China can develop the integrated circuit industry through policy making, encouraging innovative

research, interdisciplinary talent training and international cooperation.

1 INTRODUCTION

Integrated circuit (IC) is one of the most important

scientific and technological inventions of mankind in

the 20th century. Its invention marks the entry of

mankind into the information age. IC are the

foundation of modern industry and national security.

They are also an important part of emerging

technologies such as artificial intelligence, 5G

communication and quantum computing. IC and new

generation of information technology will change the

traditional manufacturing mode, additive

manufacturing, intelligent manufacturing, intelligent

networking will become a trend, intelligent

manufacturing equipment, aviation equipment,

satellite and application, rail transit equipment,

marine engineering equipment and new materials and

other industries will be a major change (Zou 2020).

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3729-6012

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1598-8587

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6859-8614

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8429-3546

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6125-4536

Corresponding author

In July 2022, the U.S. Congress passed the CHIPS

and Science Act of 2022, to strengthen semiconductor

manufacturing, design and research in the USA, as

well as the the chip supply chain in the USA (SIA

2022). DARPA has invested in breakthrough key

technology areas such as semiconductor materials, IC

design softwares, microwave devices, microsystem

technology, chip manufacturing, equipment. At

present, many mainstream technologies come from

DARPA projects

(Trusted 2022). In June 2021, the

Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan

announced the《Semiconductor Strategy》, believing

that Japan should increase investment in advanced

process manufacturing, research and development,

and advanced packaging (Japanese 2021). The

development of Korea semiconductor industry is

based on memory as the starting point to layout the

semiconductor industry. The Korean government

Qin, P., Duan, T., Zhu, X., Chen, C. and Li, X.

Study on Integrated Circuit Field Based on Hot Topics.

DOI: 10.5220/0012070400003624

In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Public Management and Big Data Analysis (PMBDA 2022), pages 83-90

ISBN: 978-989-758-658-3

 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. Under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

plans to build the world 's largest “K-semiconductor

belt” in 2030, which will include semiconductor

production, raw materials, parts, equipment and

design (Interface 2021). Europe in promoting the

development of IC more through the establishment of

“sensors”', “power devices” and other areas of

European semiconductor dvantage of large-scale chip

research and development projects to continue to

improve the competitiveness of European industrial

technology (Zhou 2021). In 2006, the Chinese

government issued and implemented the Outline of

the National Medium and Long term Scientific and

Technological Development Plan (2006-2020),

which identified 16 major projects, including Core

Electronic Devices, High-end General-purpose Chips

and Basic Software Products and Very Large Scale IC

Manufacturing Technology and Complete Processes

(Outline 2022).

According to the Yidu report (Yidu 2022), the

USA has a significant advantage in multiple

subdivisions of IC support and IC manufacturing

industry, especially in EDA/IP, logic chip design,

manufacturing equipment and other fields,

accounting for more than 40%. In Europe, the

dominant fields are IP and photoresist. Japan's

dominant areas are silicon wafers, photoresists and

photomasks. Korea's dominant areas are memory.

Taiwan 's dominant areas are wafer manufacturing

and packaging manufacturing. The advantageous

area in Chinese Mainland is packaging testing.

This paper analyzes, with three-dimension vision,

academic achievements, national policy and reports

of famous think tanks, using bibliometrics and text

analysis methods. The development trend of IC and a

number of hot topics and frontiers worthy of attention

from a new perspective are presented. The results

povide a decision-making support for domestic

universities, research institutes and enterprises to

Know the hot topics and development direction in the

field of IC.

2 ANALYSIS OF HOT TOPICS IN

IC FIELD

According to the IC related industry chain and

originals, the main research countries and regions

of 30 hot topics are analyzed in detail.

2.1 Concept of IC and Topics

IC is a kind of micro electronic devices or

components, using a certain process, the required

components in a circuit and wiring interconnection

together, made in a small or a few small

semiconductor wafers or dielectric substrate, and

then packaged in a shell, become a micro structure

with the required circuit function. In the IC industry

chain, the upstream includes IC design automation

tool EDA, core function module semiconductor IP,

core production equipment and materials. The middle

reaches are composed of chip design, manufacturing

and sealing. The downstream is mainly applied fields,

such as 5G, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things

and so on (Yin 2021).

Select relevant keywords according to the IC

related industry chain and the original, including:

integrated circuit; IC; EDA; chip; semiconductor;

CMOS; capacitor; inductor; resistor; transistor; diode;

wafer; encapsulation; inverter; Router; microwave

photonic; ciphers.

The Scival platform clusters about 50 million

peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers

collected in the Scopus database from 1996 to the

present to form a specific collection of documents,

and uses direct citation analysis to gather these

documents into nearly 96,000 specific research topics.

Prominence is an indicator to measure the

visibility or development momentum of research

topics, reflecting the global attention of the overall

scientific research of small peers. The level of

indicators reflects the significance, development

momentum or activity of research topics. It is a

momentum indicator, not a quality indicator. The

saliency is composed of three parameters: total

citations, total browsing times and CiteScore. The

calculation formula is as follows:

P 0.495[ mean( )] / stdev( )

0.391[ mean( )] / stdev( )

0.1149[ mean( )] / stdev( )

=−

+−

jjj j

jj j

CC C

VV V

SS S

Among them, C

is the total citation frequency of

the literature published in the current year and the

previous year in topic j; V

was the frequency of the

articles published in the current year and the previous

year in Scopus viewed in the theme j; S

is the impact

factor of journals published in the current year and

the previous year in topic j. The larger the value, the

greater the display, which can be understood as the

higher the research attention, up to 100%.

2.2 Analysis the High Frequency

Keywords

More than 300,000 articles in Scival were retrieved

by keywords of IC. According to the relevance and

PMBDA 2022 - International Conference on Public Management and Big Data Analysis

display of topics, 100 global hot topics from 2017 to

2022 were selected.

Extracting feature keywords from hot topic can

show the research content of each hot topic in a more

detailed and specific way. A total of 881 keywords

were extracted from 100 hot topics, and 67 high-

frequency keywords with word frequency > 3. These

67 high frequency words appear in more than 3 hot

topics, which can better reflect the specific research

hot topics in the field of IC.

The co-occurrence relationship of high-frequency

words in the same research topic is counted, and the

co-occurrence matrix of high-frequency words is

calculated and imported into Netdraw to obtain the

co-occurrence network of high-frequency keywords

(Fig. 1). In Figure 1, each node represents one high-

frequency keyword, and the node size is proportional

to the keyword frequency. The larger the node, the

higher the keyword frequency. The connection

between nodes represents the co-occurrence

relationship between two keywords. The higher the

co-occurrence frequency, the thicker the connection,

indicating that the knowledge association between

the two words is closer.

High-frequency words such as CMOS, Converter,

Inverters, Transistors, Nanowire, Millimeter Wave,

Photonics, Gate, MOSFET, Microgrid, and III-V

Semiconductors appear in a number of hot topics, and

are at the core of the co-word network and are the

focus of the IC hot topics.

Figure 1: High Frequency Keywords Analysis of articles from top 100 topics of IC

2.3 30 Hot Topics in IC and Distribution

Among the 100 hot topics, 30 topics with a rising

trends in recent five years were sele-cted, shown in

Table 1. Include: Grid|Power Sharing|Inverters;

Gallium Oxides|Schottk-y Di-odes|Energy Gap;

Microgrid|DC-DC Converter|Electric Potential;

Inverter|Space Vector Modul-ation|Electric Potential;

Microresonators|Solitons|Comb and Wattles; etc.

Further analyzed the distribution of the

countries/regions with 30 hot topics on the rise.

According to the citation frequency under this topic,

the first five countries/regions are determined.

The first tier includes the USA and China, and the

second includes India, Germany, UK, Japan,

Denmark and Iran.

The USA leads in semiconductor materials,

including CMOS, aluminum gallium nitride, III-V

semiconductor, gallium oxide, hardware security,

block ciphers, analog-to-digital converters,

millimeter waves, and regulation. China leads in the

Grid, insulated gate bipolar transistor, inverter, fuel

cell, DC-DC converter, laser radar and monolithic

microwave integrated circuit. In addition, Japan in the

CMOS image sensor; Iran in single photon detector;

turkey in the Schottky diodes; India in operational

amplifiers, inverters.

Table 1: Country/region layout of IC hot topics (2017-2022).

Topic

Prominenc

Topi c Top five countries / regions

1 304 99.854 Grid; Power Sharing; Inverters China、USA、Denmark、Iran、Australia

Study on Integrated Circuit Field Based on Hot Topics

Topic

Prominenc

Topi c Top five countries / regions

2 8130 99.526 Gallium Oxides; Schottky Diodes; Energy Gap USA、China、Japan、Korea、Germany

3 2967 99.502

Microgrid; DC-DC Converter; Electric

Potential

China、USA、Denmark、India、Iran

4 103 99.414

Inverter; Space Vector Modulation; Electric

Potential

India、Iran、China、Canada、Malasia

5 9544 99.094 Microresonators; Solitons; Comb and Wattles

USA、China、Switzerlan

、Russian、

German

6 2844 98.593

Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell

(PEMFC); Fuel Cell; DC-DC Converte

China、Iran、Egypt、USA、India

3674

98.335 Synchronous Generators; Inertia; Inverter China、USA、Denmark、Japan、Canada

8 4420 98.064

Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor (IGBT);

Power Electronics; Power Converters

China、Denmark、USA、Germany、UK

9 2445 97.988

Aluminum Gallium Nitride; Vapor Phase

Epitaxy; III-V Semiconductors

USA、Japan、China、Germany、Korea

10 5888 97.758 Phase-Locked Loop; Inverters; Grid China、Denmark、India、USA、UK

11 11828 97.577 Hardware Security; Internet of Things; RRAM USA、China、Singapore、Germany、India

12 11540 97.533

Gallium Nitrides; High Electron Mobility

Transistors; MOSFET

USA、China、Canada、Germany、UK

13 2329 97.473

Schottky Diodes; Thermionic Emission;

Electrical Properties

Turkey、India、Saudi Arabia、Iran、Egypt

14 8455 97.206 Switch; Inverter; Fault Diagnosis China、USA、Singapore、India、Iran

1732

96.898 Hardware Security; Malware; Obfuscation

USA、China、Arab Emirates、India、

German

16 2792 96.517

Masking; Differential Power Analysis; Block

Ciphers

USA、France、Belgium、Germany、China

5315

96.106

III-V Semiconductors; Light Emitting Diodes;

High Brightness

USA、China、Taiwan、Korea、France

18 8513 96.075 Electric Potential; Converter; Resonant China、USA、Korea、Canada、Denmark

1438

95.127

Single Photon Detector; Timing Jitter;

Avalanche Photodiode

Iran、China、India、USA、Denmark

20 4989 94.938

Power Amplifiers; Millimeter Wave; Noise

Figure

USA、China、Korea、Belgium、Germany

1754

94.653

DC-DC Converter; Microgrid; Acceleration

(Physics)

India、Iran、China、USA、Australia

1351

93.979

Phase Shifters; Phased Arrays; Millimeter

Wave

USA、Korea、China、Sweden、Israel

23 3703 91.812

Operational Amplifiers; Transconductance;

Low Powe

India、USA、Iran、Italy、Poland

24 1477 91.002

CMOS Image Sensor; Shutters; Integrated

Circuit

Japan、USA、China、Korea、UK

2597

90.896 Antenna Arrays; Waveguides; Glide Sweden、Spain、Canada、China、France

26 858 90.654

Voltage Controlled Oscillators; Analog-To-

Digital Converter; Delta Sigma Modulation

USA、India、China、Spain、Korea

27 913 89.996 CMOS; Phase Noise; Frequency Offset USA、Germany、Japan、Belgium、France

1803

89.619 Voltage Regulators; Drop Out; Regulator USA、China、Korea、Mexico、HK

2210

89.288

Lidar; Photon Counting; Avalanche

Photodiodes

China、UK、USA、France、Sweden

1742

88.594

Doherty Amplifiers; Broadband; Monolithic

Microwave Integrated Circuits

China、UK、USA、Canada、Italy

PMBDA 2022 - International Conference on Public Management and Big Data Analysis

3 ANALYSIS ON

DEVELOPMENT OF IC FIELD

This section analyzes from three dimensions through

policies and the reports of well-known think tanks

and the qualitative research tool Nvivo, as shown in

Figure 2. First, the interdisciplinary and talent

training of IC disciplines; Second, the gap between

China and the advanced level of IC short board and

the reasons; Third, international cooperation is

needed. A collection of think tank reports from

thinktank. In addition, 22 IC-related policies were

collected and six related web pages were obtained

through the NCapture plug-in.

Figure 2: China semiconductor industry development.

3.1 Discipline Interdisciplinary of IC

In terms of interdisciplinary, a total of 16 documents

were selected and 58 codes were completed. Among

them, the interdisciplinary coding points of IC are

mainly distributed in foreign think tank reports, and a

total of 16 disciplines were mentioned. It can be seen

that material science, applied mathematics, chemistry,

biology, physics, computer science and electrical

engineering are the main interdisciplinary disciplines

of IC.

The think tank report and policy document

mention the support measures of China and the USA

for IC interdisciplinary. Therefore, the measures of

China and the USA were coded. A total of 14

documents were coded and 31 coding points were

generated. It can be seen that STEM in the USA is a

plan to encourage students to major in science,

technology, engineering and mathematics, which has

played a huge role in the training of basic discipline

talents in the country. In addition, the USA intends to

develop a long-term plan to attract young students

into the field of science and engineering, and the

National Science Foundation, Defense, the National

Institute of Standards and Technology, the Ministry

of Energy and other institutions will provide the

interdisciplinary cooperation between universities,

research institutions ， industry and company

cooperation will double the funding, especially in

semiconductor related disciplines and research

projects. The major difference between China and the

United States is that China's IC disciplines and

project research funding institutions are relatively

single, mainly dominated by the government; In

terms of interdisciplinary training, there is less

interdisciplinary research on undergraduate and

graduate programs in China, and more emphasis is

placed on horizontal inter university, school

enterprise and Sino foreign joint training.

3.2 Analysis IC Short Board of China

In terms of semiconductor materials, 37 of the 12

documents were coded. After subdividing, it was

found that research mainly focused on the supply

maintenance of semiconductor basic materials, the

Study on Integrated Circuit Field Based on Hot Topics

development of new materials, and the support for

material research. At present, the USA, Japan and

Germany are in the leading position in semiconductor

materials. Although China has achieved the

transformation in materials, there are still problems

such as weak overall production capacity and

insufficient research and development capacity. In

terms of maintaining the supply of semiconductor

basic materials, five companies, mainly Shinetsu and

Sumco of Japan, hold 90% of the global supply.

In terms of R&D and support for new

semiconductor materials, the USA, Europe and Japan

have set up a series of plans to support technological

breakthroughs in new semiconductor materials in the

region, as shown in Table 2.

Countries usually set up special plans or funds to

promote cooperation between research institutions,

universities, industries and government for

technological breakthroughs in semiconductor

materials. China is relatively weak in the

establishment of special plans for semiconductor

materials, special funds allocation, and in the co-

operation.

Analytical coding of think tank reports and

national policy on CMOS, 53 coding points related to

CMOS were distributed in four reports of think tanks,

and 90% of the coding points were concentrated in

the Semiconductor Research Opportunity Industry

Vision and Guide (Semiconductor 2017). After

classifying the coding points, it is found that the focus

is on the application of CMOS in various fields, and

finding a new material or technology to replace

CMOS, so as to achieve continuous improvement of

the performance of the semiconductor industry. To

achieve this goal, the computerization of the national

strategy announced by the United States in 2015

listed ' computing beyond Moore 's Law ' as one of its

five strategic goals.

EDA, electronic design automation tool software,

is a large-scale IC design software development

platform. The world 's EDA software is dominated by

the three giants in the USA. Cadence, Synopsys and

Mentor Graphics. To recover the cost of development

primarily by selling software copyright. The

development of EDA industry in China is relatively

late. After the first set of EDA panda system was

introduced in 1993, the development of EDA in China

is at a low ebb. Until 2019, the market share of EDA

software in China was only 5% (Cai 2021). Although

there is still a gap between China and developed

semiconductor countries in terms of IC design, the

gap is rapidly narrowing. The IC monopoly countries

led by the USA feel threatened. In order to restrict the

development of China's IC industry, the US

Department of Commerce amended the Act to restrict

the sale of EDA software tools and equipment to

Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. and its subsidiaries.

Table 2: Support Form of Semiconductor Material Projects/Institutions in Various Countries/Regions.

Countries

/Regions

Plan or

Institution

Content

USA

Nanoelectronics

Research Initiative (NRI)

Industry-government partners supporting research in American

universities to explore devices and materials beyond CMOS.

STARnet

Supporting industry-government partnerships between U.S.

universities and governments, the STARnet Functional Acceleration

Nanomaterials Engineering and New Structural Center focuses on

new materials including TMDs, functional oxides and magnetic

materials.

European

Union

CEA-leti

France Research and Technology Organization, specializing in the

application of nanotechnology in various fields of the country.

European Graphene

Flagship Program

The budget of EUR 1 billion is dedicated to exploring graphene

materials, devices and applications, and to bringing graphene into

society from academic laboratories within 10 years.

Japan

National Institute of

Industrial Technology

(AIST)

AIST is one of Japan 's largest public research institutions dedicated

to materials and chemistry departments studying the computational

design of nanomaterials, carbon nanotube applications, and advanced

functional materials.

PMBDA 2022 - International Conference on Public Management and Big Data Analysis

Countries

/Regions

Plan or

Institution

Content

Center for I-nnovative

Integrated Electronic

Systems (CIES)

CIES is established for the research cooperation of international

universities and industrial sessions, focusing on exploring spin

transfer torque magnetic RAM materials, devices and architectures.

China

14th Five-Year raw

material industry

development plan

It is proposed to focus on the major needs of national defense

construction, people's livelihood short board and manufacturing

power construction, and carry out coordinated research on bandgap

semiconductors and display materials, key materials for ICs, carbon

based materials, biomedical materials, etc.

Key Laboratory of

Semiconductor Materials

Science, Chinese

Academy of Sciences

Focusing on the frontier of international semiconductor material

science and the key scientific and technical

roblems to be solved, we

carried out basic research on semiconductor materials and device

applications, focusing on semiconductor functional materials and

integration.

3.3 International Cooperation in IC

In terms of international cooperation and competition

in IC, as the USA holds the core technology of IC and

relies, only on Asian suppliers in chip manufacturing,

international cooperation is needed. In recent years,

Korea has also clearly demonstrated its willingness to

lead the world in the cutting-edge field of IC and

build itself into a manufacturing power, thus its

technical strengthened cooperation with Germany,

the USA and Israel. China relies heavily on other

countries and regions in the IC industry, especially

the USA, Korea, the European Union and Japan.

Therefore, China strongly encourages domestic

companies, universities and research institutions to

actively participate in international cooperation, carry

out transnational cooperation and exchanges, and

facilitate attracting foreign investment to set up

factories in China or companies to set up overseas

research centers. At present, the University of

Electronic Science and Technology of China has set

up a joint Chinese and foreign degree program of

electronic information. Together with the University

of Grassla, it has trained a group of outstanding

talents with international vision, international

competitiveness and a high sense of responsibility.

4 CONCLUSION

In recent years, China has made progress of IC, such

as grid, Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor, inverters,

fuel cells, DC - DC converters, Lidar and Microwave

IC. There is still a gap with the advanced countries in

the fields of semiconductor materials, CMOS, block

ciphers, operational amplifiers, etc. In the future, we

can provide support for the development of IC in

China from four aspects: interdisciplinary talent

training, policy formulation, encouragement of

innovative scientific research and international

cooperation.

First, in terms of policy, learn from the experience

of developed countries and improve the promotion

policy in this field. For example, the government has

provided tax incentives, low-interest loans, and free

land use rights for these companies, as well as

through various initiatives such as expanding capital

investment, reforming the immigration system, and

protecting intellectual property rights.

Second, in terms of interdisciplinary talent

training, the integrated circuit interdisciplinary

system should be improved. Integrated Circuit

Discipline Should Get More Resources to Provide

Support for the Introduction and Training of High-

level, Interdisciplinary and Compound Talents.

Third, in terms of encouraging innovative

scientific research, according to the hot research

topics of global IC, combined with the weak and short

links in the field of IC in China, we will break through

China 's shortcomings in the field of IC and maintain

and develop leading technologies by expanding

investment, targeted training and introduction of

sophisticated talents.

Fourth, in terms of international cooperation,

based on the country / region layout of hot research

topics, we will carry out multi-field and in-depth

exchanges and cooperation with countries in a

dominant position in the field of IC shortcomings in

China.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This work was supported by Nanjing University of

Aeronautics and Astronautics 2021 Graduate

Study on Integrated Circuit Field Based on Hot Topics

Research and Practice Innovation Program (No:

xcxjh20211001)

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