IEDM 2025 Highlights: Power, 3D Integration, and Ferroelectric Breakthroughs Shaping the Future of Electronics
IEDM 2025 8th-10th December 2025, San Francisco, CA USA - More than 600 presentations in this year’s edition of the international electron devices meeting, covering all aspects of the state of the art in today’s electronics.
The keynote speeches featured Qualcomm, IBM, and GlobalFoundries. Qualcomm underlined the growing unsustainability of AI under current power ratings, emphasizing that memory bandwidth, cost, thermal loading, and overall power consumption all require major breakthroughs, with system-technology co-optimization (STCO) playing a crucial role.
IBM presented the evolving needs of enterprise systems, highlighting demands for higher TOPS and increased power efficiency that will require innovative technology solutions.
GlobalFoundries showcased technology breakthroughs such as 3D integration, with the potential to deliver TWh/year-level energy savings across semiconductor end-market applications. The non-volatile memory solution on FD-SOI was highlighted as particularly attractive.
Three full technical sessions were dedicated to ferroelectric devices and circuits (Session 4: Memory Reliability; Session 12: Ferroelectric Memories; and Session 30: Advanced Ferroelectric Memories and Devices). In addition, several other sessions included significant contributions on ferroelectronics, notably Session 3 (Embedded Memory) and Session 23 (Reliability Across Materials).
Technical highlights included Kyungmee Song from Samsung on fatigue-free cycling; Jziehi Chen from Shandong on imprint-centric retention; charge trapping in MIFIS NAND presented by H. Joh from KAIST; parasitic capacitance in 2TnC FeRAMs by Shan Deng from Notre Dame; β-W electrodes on HZO by Yu-Tsung Liao from National Taiwan University; and identification of single-domain switching using TEM-EBIC by Venkatesan from GeorgiaTech–UCLA. AI-driven approaches for materials and circuit optimization were also prominent, for example work by Jackie Yao from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on AI for beyond-CMOS technologies. Switching kinetics received significant attention as well, notably extensions of the NLS model for switching in AlScN presented by Tian Ling Pen.
Finally, in the area of circuits and arrays, F. Müller from GlobalFoundries presented 1 kB test arrays operating at sub-1 V supply voltages.
The next edition of IEDM is scheduled for 12–16 December in San Francisco, with details available at the official conference website IEDM 2026.