This Special Topic of the Journal of Semiconductors (JOS) features expanded versions of key articles presented at the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Integrated Circuits Technologies and Applications (ICTA), which was held in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China, from October 25 to 27, 2024. IEEE ICTA is an IEEE flagship conference in the field of integrated circuits (IC) in China, which provides a communication platform for sharing the state-of-the-art techniques from experts in the field of ICs. Among the 115 papers presented at ICTA 2024, the Technical Program Committee and the Award Committee have selected 4 high-quality articles to recommend to the Special Topic of JOS, covering a wide range of technical fields, including two papers on RF IC, one paper on Analog IC, and one paper on Wireline IC.

The first article in the field of RFIC is from Zhejiang University^[1]. It introduces a battery-free wireless temperature sensing chip for long-termly monitoring the food production environment. Instead of the ADC-based power-hungry circuits in conventional works, it proposes calibrated oscillator-based CMOS temperature sensor. Moreover, the use of battery is eliminated as the sensor chip can harvest the power transferred by a remote reader. The temperature sensing chip is fabricated in 55 nm CMOS process, and the reader chip is implemented in 65 nm CMOS technology. Experimental results show that the temperature measurement error achieves ±1.6 °C from 25 to 50 °C，with battery-free readout by a remote reader.

The second article is from Tsinghua University^[2]. The article introduces a two-way series Doherty-PA (DPA) with a distributed impedance inverting network (IIN) for millimeter wave applications. The wideband linear and PBO efficiency enhancement is achieved owning to the proposed distributed IIN. Base on 65 nm CMOS process, this work realizes a measured 3 dB bandwidth of 15.5 GHz with 21.2 dB peak small-signal gain at 34.2 GHz. It achieves OP1dB over 13.4 dBm and Psat over 16 dBm between 21-to-30 GHz. It exhibits −28.25 and −20 dB EVM for a 200 MHz 64-QAM OFDM and a 2 GHz 16-QAM OFDM signals at 27 GHz without DPD and equalization.

The Analog IC paper is from University of Science and Technology of China^[3]. It presents a high-precision bandgap reference (BGR) with an ultra-low temperature coefficient (TC), line sensitivity (LS), and designable reference voltage for battery management system (BMS) applications. A low dropout regulator (LDO) is employed at the output to compensate for the limited driving capability of the current-mode BGR, while a pre-regulator circuit is implemented to improve its LS. In order to achieve a low TC, piecewise curvature compensation is used to compensate for the higher-order nonlinearity of the VBE voltage, and two-point trimming at 20 and 60 °C is used to ensure the effectiveness of piecewise curvature compensation under batch trimming. Based on 180 nm process, the BGR has an output voltage of 2.5 V and consumes 84 μA of current at a 5 V supply voltage. An average TC of 2.69 ppm/°C with two-point trimming over the temperature range of −40 to 125 °C. The proposed BGR can deliver a load current of 1 mA with an LS of 0.0042%/V.

The wireline IC paper is from Zhejiang University^[4]. It introduces a 112 Gbps DSP-based PAM4 serializer-deserializer (SerDes) receiver with a wide band equalization tuning analog front-end (AFE). The wide band equalization is realized by implementing source degeneration, high-pass branch and inductive peaking. The AFE provides flexible peaking tuning and up to 17.5 dB peaking tuning range at Nyquist frequency. With the proposed AFE, the receiver sees eye opening after digital FIR equalization and achieves 6 × 10⁻⁹ BER with a 29.6 dB insertion loss channel.

Finally, we would like to thank the authors for contributing their articles and meeting the tight deadlines required for this Special Topic. We also thank many anonymous reviewers whose feedback and comments ensure the high quality of the journal. We hope that this JOS Special Topic on ICTA 2024 will provide a useful cross section of the recent progress on the development of the ICs.