Asad Abidi Akira Matsuzawa's Contribution to Japan's Semiconductor Industry My reflections I met Akira Matsuzawa in 1988 at an event that may have some significance in the community of Japanese analog IC designers. The occasion was the second JSAP/IEEE Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSSC.2021.3126972 Date of current version: 24 January 2022 Symposium on VLSI Circuits held in Tokyo. The event was a rump session (a designation unique to this symposium) that turned into an informal congress of the leaders from the major Japanese companies involved in the design of analog-todigital (A/D) converters (ADCs) for portable video cameras, or camcorders. The event was memorable 1943-0582/22©2022IEEE enough to warrant a listing of its participants (Table 1). The discussion was in English. As far as I know, this was only the second time that a major IC design conference had been held in Japan with English as its official language. I remember the informative technical content and, especially, the animated discussion that followed the rump IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE WINTER 2022 41