IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Spring 2014 - 73

IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits Editor-in-Chief Michal Flynn of the University of Michigan
and John Khoury of Silicon Labs, Austin, Texas, accepted the ISSCC Evening Session Award
for organizing the 2013 panel "You're Hired! The Top 25 Interview Questions for Circuit
Designers." The two represented academic and industry, respectively.

Plenary Speaker Dr. Eric Heijne.

Plenary Speaker Dr. Susie Wee.

hadron collider (LHC) at CERN and continued with an explanation of how the
accelerator is used to create two photon
beams at a steady-state energy of 7 TeV
when collisions are initiated. Electronics
are used to reduce the massive volume
of data from the detectors, first with
trigger levels directly on the analog signal readout chips and then transmitted
from the detector for real-time analysis
to narrow the data that are permanently
stored. Heijne explained that CMOS circuits are optimal for the signal-processing functions in the detectors and that
radiation tolerance and low power are
critical to successful operation. He then
described the segmented silicon sensors used for particle tracking, which
include silicon microstrip devices as
well as pixel detectors and their associated readout channel CMOS circuits.
Heijne emphasized the need for
radiation hardness in the silicon circuits

and detailed the countermeasures
taken in system design to mitigate
the effects of radiation. After showing
several animations of the accelerator
and detector layers, Heijne described
the components of a typical readout
scheme for a silicon detector. These
consist of the front end, a 128-channel readout chip and trigger, and data
acquisition of interesting events. Heijne
said that "the development of densely
integrated hybrid pixel detectors has
been essential in enabling excellent pattern recognition, even with thousands
of particle tracks in successive 25-ns
exposures." He described the installation of the chips, sensors, and associated power and cooling infrastructure
on mechanical supports, highlighting
the fact that most of the chips are not
packaged but are chip-on-board. Several hundreds of thousands of chips
were installed for each experiment.

Heijne then explained how these electronics were used to discover the Higgs
particle. His conclusion: "Microelectronics will allow continual improvements in the architecture, design, and
performance of very complex scientific
instruments, thus extending the useful
lifetime of the huge investment in the
LHC accelerator and further enhancing
the potential for new discoveries."
Susie Wee of Cisco explored the
future of network technology in the
closing plenary talk, "The Next Generation of Networked Experiences."
Wee highlighted the network transition to a programmable architecture
with the advent of software-defined
networking (SDN), which provides an
opportunity to improve the operational
experience of networks and increases
the speed of deploying new services
and tying applications to the network
for improved performance and capability. She explained how the end-user
experience has evolved along a number
of dimensions to become increasingly
mobile, immersive, pervasive, social,
interactive, ambient, and intelligent.
Specifically, video communication has
become more mobile, immersive, and
pervasive through a range of software,
hardware, and web-based clients.
Wee showed how collaboration is
progressing beyond videoconferencing to include interactive touch experiences. These "augmented collaboration
experiences" seamlessly blend videoconferencing with collaboration via
interactive content. Wee then explained
the evolution away from the rigid network architectures and limited means
of configuration available today toward

Interview FAQs and panelist tips may
be found in the Spring 2013 issue of
this magazine, pp. 83-86, at http://
ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.
jsp?arnumber=6487594 or by scanning
the QR code.

IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE

s p r i n g 2 0 14

http://http:// http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Spring 2014