On behalf of the organizing committee and the IEEE Electron Devices Society, Microwave Theory and Technology Society, and Solid-State Circuits Society, I invite you to be a part of the upcoming 2001 IEEE GaAs IC Symposium. This year's symposium will be held October 21–24 in Baltimore, MD, at the Renaissance Harborplace Hotel. Over the last 23 years, the IEEE GaAs IC Symposium has become the preeminent international forum on developments in integrated circuits using GaAs, InP, SiGe, GaN, and SiC, as well as other compound semiconductor devices. In 2001, the Symposium continues its tradition of presenting the best from around the world in high frequency microelectronics. This year's program continues to demonstrate the developments in commercial wireless and optical communications technology. Major focus areas of this year's GaAs IC Symposium, organized by Tim Henderson of TriQuint and the Technical Program Committee, include state-of-the-art circuits and technology for:
The technical sessions will highlight all aspects of technology: device development and fabrication, characterization and modeling, IC design and testing, high volume manufacturing, reliability, and system applications. We will also continue the discussion that we started last year on the topic of a technology roadmap for III-V compound semiconductor ICs. Hot new results obtained this summer will be presented in the "Late News" session.
This year we have five exciting Panel Sessions spread over the three days of the technical sessions. These are intended to be timely, thought-provoking, educational, and possibly even controversial. The topics are as follows:
The 23rd IEEE GaAs IC Symposium keeps up our tradition of providing focused educational opportunities through our Short Course and Primer Course, both held on Sunday, October 21. Chris Bozada from the USAF has organized a very interesting and highly applicable one-day Short Course on "Optical Fiber Systems" taught by five industry experts. The course starts with an overview of fiber systems, their design, IC requirements and technology trade-offs. Then, two sections are devoted to IC design issues, firstly the various amplifiers: transimpedance, limiting, AGC and modulator and LASER drivers, and following that serialisers, deserialisers (SERDES - aka multiplexers & demultiplexers) and clock and data recovery (CDR) designs. The important topic of system and subsystem packaging and integration are tackled next, followed by a discussion of photonics for RF applications. Finally, all short course instructors will offer their opinions on the future trends of the technology.
Stephen Long and Donald Estreich will present our Primer Course, which is not only an excellent tutorial on compound semiconductor electronics but is presented within the context of this year's symposium contents. You have the opportunity to learn of new products from the approximately 40 exhibitors in the GaAs IC Technology Exhibition, and potential customers for the latest commercially available GaAs ICs can hear about these in the Vendor Product Forum, organized by Bill Peatman of Anadigics and Norman Chiang of California Eastern Labs. This forum will review recent wireless product developments from some of the leaders in the industry. Questions we hope to address include
To complement the full technical program, we have provided several social events to allow interactions with colleagues while catching up with the newest technology available on the market. These events include the Sunday evening Opening Reception, the Monday evening Technology Exhibition Reception, and the Tuesday evening of fun, science, and an Imax movie at the Baltimore Science Center. Finally, I want to announce the winners of our 4th Outstanding Paper Award from the 2000 Symposium: M. Sokolich, C. Fields, B. Shi, Y. K. Brown, M. Montes, R. Martinez, A. R. Kramer, S. Thomas III, and M. Madhav of HRL Laboratories for their paper "A Low Power 72.8GHz Static Frequency Divider Implemented In AlInAs/InGaAs HBT IC Technology." We hope you'll join us in Baltimore for the 23rd IEEE GaAs IC Symposium.
To find out more, please visit the Symposium website at http://www.gaasic.org.
John Sitch
Nortel Networks
Nepeon, ON, Canada