The System LSI Research Center (SLRC) was established in 2001 to promote SoC (System-on-a-Chip) research, form a central industrial cluster in the Silicon Sea Belt Project, and foster SoC research and development personnel with semiconductor and integrated circuit technology. The second phase began in 2011 to conduct primary research on social information systems, research and development of clean energy technology, and pioneering new application fields. And in April 2021, SLRC started its third phase. The social information infrastructure and computing platforms that support our daily lives will soon face a significant turning point. The reason for this is that the following “two new eras” are about to arrive simultaneously.

1. Post-Moore Era: Although Moore’s Law, doubling the number of transistors in a semiconductor chip every two years, has contributed to continuously improving computers’ performance and power efficiency, we cannot expect sustainable such transistor shrinking anymore. This means that steady improvements in computer performance will no longer occur, marking the arrival of the so-called post-Moore era, causing an unacceptable amount of energy dissipation to support the progress of the information society.
2. Digital Society Era: Sophisticated and complex applications, such as big data and AI processing, are now spreading explosively, and sustainable improvement of information processing capability is essential to realize a sustainable advanced information society. In particular, as digital transformation and digitization accelerate in the future, expansion of computing power has become crucial to discovering a sustainable information society.

Based on such technological and social background, it is necessary to promote research and development from a medium- to long-term perspective by enhancing “SoC (system LSI) technology” into “computing technology” and “social information infrastructure” into “ultra-digital social infrastructure,” respectively. To tackle these challenging issues, the third phase of SLRC has set the two critical missions: “to explore next-generation computing platforms in the Post-Moore era with the consideration of their environmental impacts” and “to explore the direction of digital society with emerging information technologies. We drive the research of new computer architecture technologies, integrated circuits, semiconductor technologies, and their applications for the next coming digital society to achieve these goals.

June 1, 2022.
Director Koji Inoue