In the past year, the Denver SSCS Chapter hosted eight monthly seminars, including four by SSCS Distinguished Lecturers.  These talks spanned a variety of exciting developments in IC design, cutting-edge CMOS technology, and high-speed test.

In the first seminar of 2006, Dr. Victor Chan of IBM gave a very informative overview of state-of-the-art strain and substrate engineering techniques to enhance channel mobility in bulk and SOI CMOS. In February, Dr. Osvaldo Buccafusca of Avago Technologies, who is also the Chair of the IEEE Centennial Subsection that covers northern Colorado and southern Wyoming, described the challenges and implementation of a very high-speed optical sampling oscilloscope for characterization of optical

serial links.  Adam Healey of Agere Systems, Chair of the IEEE 802.3ap Standards Committee, built on this theme with a discussion of 10 Gigabit Ethernet over backplane interconnects. This topic is of significant interest to the many Fort Collins IC designers dealing with high-speed electrical data links.  In the next talk, Stefan Rusu presented on Intel's Dual-Core Xeon(r) Processor. Abstracts and slides for all lectures are available at the Chapter’s website.

Dr. Marcel Pelgrom of Philips Research visited Fort Collins in May to deliver our first Distinguished Lecture of the year.  A pioneering expert on transistor variability, he delivered an insightful talk on the analog challenges associated with nanometer CMOS.  Given its relevant nature, Dr. Pelgrom's seminar drew a chapter record attendance of 120!  Alvin Loke, Denver Chapter Chair, presented an award of appreciation to Dr. Pelgrom.

The Distinguished Lecturer seminar by Dr. Marcel Pelgrom attracted an audience of 120 at Fort Collins, CO on 11 May, 2006.

The next DL seminar was given by Dr. Kiyoo Itoh of Hitachi Central Research Laboratory, who spoke about ultra-low voltage nano-scale embedded RAMs.  Dr. Itoh emphasized the importance of fully-depleted SOI technology as an enabling solution to overcome device mismatch and allow for ultra-low voltage operation.  Prof. Boris Murmann was the next speaker, coming from Stanford University to discuss the importance of digital techniques to compensate for analog limitations, such as nonlinearity and variability, in sub-100nm CMOS.

In August, Prof. Behzad Razavi visited from the University of California at Los Angeles.  His much anticipated seminar covered some exciting new developments on the 60GHz RF CMOS transceiver front and discussed design and modeling challenges in that domain.  Not surprisingly, Prof. Razavi's renowned authorship drew quite a trail for autographs.  Thanks to members-at-large Herman Pang and Michael Gildorf of Avago Technologies for making possible our first ever seminar recorded on DVD. The Society distributed it as a technical treat to attendees at the Society’s Far East Chapters Luncheon and Meeting in November. The DVD will be available to chapters, upon request.

Herman Pang (far left) and Mikail Gilsdor (second from right, second row) video taped Dr. Razavi’s talk on 1 August, 2006. Dr. Razavi is eighth from right, front row. A. Loke and Tin Tin Wee, Chapter Secretary and Webmaster, are to his right.

Following a social event in November, the year ended with a ninth lecture by Sam Naffziger of Advanced Micro Devices, who spoke on high-performance processors in a power-limited world.  Fort Collins has quickly become a hotbed of leading-edge microprocessor activity with AMD recently opening its brand new Mile High Design Center to match Intel's established presence in Itanium development.

We regret to announce that Past Chair Dr. Don McGrath decided to step aside from chapter activities, having been overwhelmed by his responsibilities at LSI Logic.  We wish to extend our best wishes to him and heartfelt thanks for his instrumental leadership and commitment to grow this young chapter for several years soon after its inception in late 2002. We welcome Bruce Doyle who recently joined the existing officer team.

Please visit ewh.ieee.org/r5/denver/sscs/ for more information, including past presentation slides, about our chapter events.