Hot Chips 27 Highlights

......Broad social and economic trends are challenging the semiconductor industry to adapt to the next generation of systems and services. Computing continues to migrate from desktops and notebooks to mobile devices and the cloud. Social media and multimedia growth will drive further consumer demand for wireless bandwidth. The emerging machineto-machine communication network known as the Internet of Things (IoT) will place unprecedented demands on chip designs to deliver connectivity, reliability, and security with extremely low power consumption. Moore’s law continues to enable unparalleled levels of integration for processors, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and systems on chip (SoCs). All four trends were in evidence at the 27th Hot Chips Symposium on High Performance Chips (Hot Chips 27), held in August 2015 at the Flint Center in Cupertino, CA. This article presents highlights of new developments in silicon that align with these trends and offers a glimpse into the emerging technologies that will define the coming decade, focusing on a few designs and keynote addresses not covered by the technical articles in this special issue.