ISSCC 2000 Preview

Richard Crisp Progran Chair ISSCC 2000 crisp@rambus.com

ISSCC 2000 ACTIVITIES

The 47th International Solid-State Circuits Conference activities will be held Sunday, February 6 through Thursday, February 10, 2000, at the San Francisco Marriott. The lineup of events is summarized in Table 1. Tutorial lectures are presented in six subject areas on Sunday, February 6, the day before the formal start of the conference. Three sessions of the Short Course are scheduled on Thursday, February 10, the day after the formal conference close. There will be 25 technical paper sessions composed of a total of 172 papers on Monday through Wednesday. There are three papers in the plenary session and the remaining papers will be presented in five parallel sessions. A total of 8 evening discussion sessions will be held on Monday and Tuesday evenings. A technical book display will located nearby the paper sessions, and a social hour is scheduled for Monday afternoon following the paper sessions.

Table 1. 2000 ISSCC Activity Schedule

SHORT COURSE

The title of the ISSCC 2000 Short Course is Circuits and Devices for RF Wireless Networks, and lecturers and their topics are summarized in Table 2. This Short Course is intended to jump start engineers in the design and development of wireless communications devices by organizing them into three sections covering LNAs, Mixers, and Power Amplifiers, re-spectively. Emphasis on devices, modeling, and practical considerations will be a common theme. With personal communications devices expected to play an increasing role in the new millennium, the topic is highly relevant to the conference theme and should provide value to the attendees.

Table 2. Short-Course Lecturers and Titles.

TUTORIALS

Tutorials introduce attendees to the state-of-the-art in integrated circuits and give understanding of and perspective on presentations at the ISSCC. Each tutorial is on a seminal topic related to the conference and is presented by an expert member of the Technical Program Committee. The lecturers and the titles of their presentations are shown in Table 3. All six tutorials will be presented in parallel, so it is possible to register for any combination of three tutorials.

Table 3. Tutorial Lecturers and Titles

Henry Samueli, plenary speaker at the 1999 ISSCC.

TECHNICAL PAPER SESSIONS

The three papers of the plenary session are closely coupled to this year's conference theme, ICs for 21st Century Systems. In the first paper, N. Noda of Toyota Motor Corporation, of Toyota, Japan, will describe the requirements for the evolution of Automotive Electronics Systems in his paper, "21st century cars and ICs." The second paper, "The new millennium: wireless technologies for a truly mobile society," presented by G. Weinberger of Infineon Technologies, Munich, Germany, will discuss the requirements and development of portable communications devices in the next century. Finally, discussing semiconductor device technologies in the next century will be M. Pinto of Lucent Technologies" Bell Labs in his paper, "Atoms to applets: Building systems ICs in the 21^st century."

The 172 technical papers will be presented in 25 sessions on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. The session titles, group by topic, include:

Analog

• "Nyquist rate data converters" (Monday afternoon)
• "Filters and amplifiers" (Tuesday morning)
• "Oversampling converters" (Wednesday morning)
• "Analog techniques" (Wednesday afternoon)

Communications

• "Gigabit rate communications" (Monday afternoon)
• "Wireless Rx/Tx" (Tuesday morning)
• "Frequency synthesizers and dividers" (Tuesday afternoon)
• "Wireline communications" (Wednesday morning)
• "Wireless building blocks" (Wednesday afternoon)

Digital

• "High-frequency microprocessors" (Monday afternoon)
• "Clock generation and distribution" (Tuesday morning)
• "High-speed I/O" (Tuesday afternoon)
• "Logic and systems" (Wednesday morning)
• "Next generation microprocessors"Ó (Wednesday morning)

Imagers and MEMS

• "Image sensors" (Monday afternoon)
• "Integrated sensors and display circuits"Ó (Tuesday morning)

Memory

• "Non-volatile and SRAM" (Tuesday afternoon)
• "DRAM" (Wednesday afternoon)

Signal Processing

• "Signal processing for communications" (Monday afternoon)
• "Signal processing for multimedia" (Tuesday afternoon)
• "Mixed signal technologies" (Wednesday morning)

Technology Directions

• "Technology directions: Emerging memory and device technologies" (Tuesday morning)
• "Technology directions: Low-temperature circuits and diagnostic techniques for microprocessors" (Tuesday afternoon)
• "Technology directions: High-frequency wireless" (Wednesday morning)
• "Technology Directions: Low-power and digital techniques" (Wednesday afternoon)

EVENING DISCUSSION SESSIONS

There are a total of eight Evening Discussion Sessions (four on Monday evening and four on Tuesday evening). The titles and moderators are listed in Table 4.

Table 4. Moderators and Titles of the Evening Discussion Sessions

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