IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q1 2022 - 81

and research institutions faced the challenge of a field
that seemed to be moving fast from the scientific departments
into technology and industry, with almost
no incubation time at the engineering level. To face this
challenge, the undergraduate curriculum was extended
in most faculties to include nanoelectronics related topics,
in addition to traditional courses focusing on circuit
design and analysis. In addition, the move towards interdisciplinary
research has also triggered significant
activities in the areas of neuroscience, computational
biology, bio-electronics and medical imaging. In parallel
to the strong efforts of getting involved in those modern
engineering fields, the universities are also strengthening
their activities (both in teaching and research) in the
more traditional areas of electrical engineering, such as
control theory, energy conversion, power systems, etc.
Israeli universities have always viewed new faculty
as its critical resource and main mechanism to promote
research quality and to implement research strategies
for the future. Attracting and retaining high-quality faculty
members in our field is often challenging. Because
of Israel's situation and its small number of high‐quality
electrical engineering departments, our main candidate
pool are Israeli researchers returning to Israel, mostly
from the US. Many of them are our own graduate students,
returning after a postdoc period. This small " market "
creates an unavoidable inbreeding effect, both in
terms of scientific background and in the distribution
of research areas. Our recruiting efforts are affected by
strong competition from the Hi-Tech industry and US
universities for technologically‐oriented researchers.
While salary gaps are an important factor, other issues
such as small institute-provided startup grants, teaching
and administrative loads, and unfavorable IP and
consulting regulations have also been considerable inhibitors
for recruiting and retaining faculty.
As a general paradigm, Israeli researchers and educators
are very attentive to global trends in the circuits
and systems field. For example, in the last few years we
observe a significant increase in the roles of large-scale
system integration, parallelism, decentralization and wide
accesability. Accordingly, we aim at strengthening a range
of relevant areas such as system security, distributed networked
systems, mixed signal systems and multi-sensor
information fusion. In the nano and micro electronic areas,
we note the trend towards non-conventional lithography.
We aim to develop high level devices based on these
new methodologies and to develop novel circuit design
methodologies for these new elements. One leading view
is that the traditional distinctions between the " analog "
and " digital " engineers, or between " hardware " and " software "
expertise, are over. Similarly, " cross-layer " design is
becoming a major paradigm in communication engineerFIRST
QUARTER 2022
ing. All this encourages us to further increase the (already
considerable) level of cooperation between researchers.
In addition, modern Electrical Engineering is a wide
discipline that continuously develops and changes.
In this light, a leading educational goal is to qualify
engineers and researchers that will be able to cope
with future problems and challenges, considering that
technological knowledge is evolving in high pace. For that
purpose, Israeli universities aim to provide its graduates
with deep theoretical and technological foundations
that will stand the test of time, and enable them to continue
their professional development well into their careers.
The studies in all Electrical Engineering programs
are governed by a carefully crafted educational outlook
that emphasizes basic studies and fundamentals, which
are complimented by specialization. Particular efforts
are made to balance between Mathematics and basic
sciences vis a vis Electrical Engineering expertise. Also,
laboratory work is emphasized, mainly projects that are
the place where students have an opportunity to exhibit
originality and independence. Most courses are taught
in the traditional classroom with all courses having also
recitation sessions (given by TA's). Homework and large
assignments are common. Self‐study courses are rare.
Some courses are filmed and are available on the Technion's
Moodle, YouTube, or PanOpto. Originally meant
for students who are on military reserve duty, the filmed
courses have become popular with many students that
use them to make up classes they miss.
Research and education in circuits and systems has
made significant progress over recent years. New research
directions have developed, and researchers in
this area continue to collaborate and actively interact
with Israel's flourishing VLSI industry. While the diverse
activities within this research areas cannot be fully covered
within this short report, following are several key
research activities.
VLSI Architecture
Several researchers are focusing on computer architectures
in the post-Moore's era: processing in memory
and in-data processing architectures and their applications,
as well as hardware accelerators, for example
in the fields of machine learning and bioinformatics.
These groups are among the pioneers in adapting the
emerging resistive memory technologies to big datascale
non-von Neumann architecture development.
Another active field of research is the emerging field of
hardware acceleration in bioinformatics. Several contributions
include processing-in-memory accelerator for
DNA sequence alignment, and design of the world's first
hardware accelerator for 3rd generation DNA sequencing
read mapping. Other related topics are memory fault
IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE
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IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q1 2022

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