Author(s)

Di Wu

School of Electronics and Information, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China.

The golden age of digital chips seems to be coming to an end. For decades, we have relied on making transistors smaller and increasing clock speeds to improve performance. However, when chip sizes shrink below 90 nanometers, this approach becomes untenable—power consumption spirals out of control, and heat issues threaten to burn the chips. Meanwhile, processors are getting faster, but memory cannot keep pace, widening the gap between the two. Faced with these challenges, engineers have had to explore new avenues. This article outlines the four major breakthrough directions in digital chip design in recent years: leveraging parallel computing to enable multiple cores to collaborate and divide tasks, using pipeline and hyper-threading technologies to maximize the value of each clock cycle; adopting clock gating, low-swing signals, and other technologies to optimize energy efficiency down to every joule; designing specialized accelerators tailored for specific tasks, sacrificing versatility but achieving energy efficiency improvements of tens or even hundreds of times; and constructing latency-insensitive designs and on-chip networks to ensure more stable and reliable communication within the chip. These technologies do not exist in isolation but complement and support one another, collectively shaping the new landscape of chip design in the post-Moore’s Law era. The shift from solely pursuing faster and smaller chips to balancing power consumption, performance, and area marks a profound paradigm shift in chip design. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to provide a quick introduction for beginners entering the digital chip industry to the challenges encountered in chip development and some cutting-edge technologies for addressing these issues.

Computer Architecture, Post-Moore’s Law, Low-Power Design, Heterogeneous Computing, Network-on-Chip, System-on-Chip

Wu, D. (2025) The Development of Digital Chip. Journal of Computer and Communications, 13, 147-186. doi: 10.4236/jcc.2025.1310009.