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Hundreds of thousands of articles have been published in the field of chip design and fabrication over the past few years. Luckily, ETO tools can help distill broader trends from the flood of papers. In our last post, we surveyed global chip design and fabrication research at a high level using ETO's Research Almanac. Today, we'll show how the Map of Science can help you hone in on critical pockets of chip research around the world.
The Map of Science organizes hundreds of millions of global research publications into research clusters, which are groups of articles that cite each other often - typically because they share other things in common, such as topics, concepts, or languages. You can use the Map's built-in filters to narrow down to clusters that are relevant to a particular subject, or based on other characteristics, like growth rate, country, or organization.
Map of Science users often want to learn about the "top" areas of research on a particular subject. There could be many ways to define "top" research, of course, but ETO analysts often use a combination of the Map's growth and scale concepts to begin the analysis. With this approach, we look for research clusters that are both unusually large and have lots of recent articles - a rare pairing.
Let's see how this works for chip design and fabrication in particular. After tinkering with filters in the Map's list view, I narrow down to research clusters with a growth rating of 75 or higher (that is, clusters with a higher proportion of recently published articles than 75% or more of all clusters in the Map) and with at least 1000 new articles in the last five years. (You could experiment with different thresholds on each filter, if you liked.)
Out of nearly 86,000 clusters in the Map, only 517 clusters currently meet these filters (as of the publication of this post). Next, I'll use the subjects menu to identify the clusters within this group with lots of research related to chip design and fabrication.
28 clusters remain. Finally, I’ll return to the Map's list view and add a column listing the percentage of articles related to chip design and fabrication in each cluster. By sorting this column in descending order, I can ensure I’m looking at the most relevant clusters.
What are these clusters about? With the Map's key concepts feature and a few minutes spent browsing the top clusters' detail views, we can get a rough lay of the land:
Many of these clusters appear to focus on research into "post-Moore's law" semiconductors, reflecting concern in industry and academia about looming limits to traditional chip technologies. For several decades, the semiconductor industry has pursued an exploratory research agenda knowing that eventually complementary metal–oxide semiconductor (CMOS)-based semiconductor device manufacturing would reach atomic limits: the point at which we cannot physically fit more transistors on silicon integrated circuits.
The "hot topic" clusters we've identified reflect several different themes in this emerging research agenda, including semiconductors built around new models of computation, such as neuromorphic computing (3255), and technologies used for more efficient architectures and packaging, such as photonics (23560). (Photonics are also increasingly used for high-speed networking and data communication between processors.)
To dig deeper into any of these different areas of chip design and fabrication research, try using the Map's cluster detail view to identify key countries, organizations, research institutions, and articles in different clusters. You could also run a similar "top clusters" analysis for subjects other than chips - how about chemistry, radiology, or robotics?
As always, we're glad to help you get the most out of the Map of Science and our other resources. Visit our support hub to contact us, book live support with an ETO staff member or access the latest documentation for our tools and data. 🤖