IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Spring 2016 - 104

UK-Ireland SSCS Chapter 5G Mini-Workshop
Part of the Chapter's Advanced Topics in Microelectronic Engineering Series

Over 70 researchers, design engineers, and students attended the afternoon mini-workshop "Low-Power
Radio for the Internet of Everything,"
delivered by Bluetooth coinventor
Sven Mattisson at the Tyndall National
Institute, Cork (http://www.tyndall.
ie/), on 7 March 2016. The event was
part of the United Kingdom and Ireland
Solid-State Circuits (SSCS) Chapter's
Advanced Topics in Microelectronic
Engineering series.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSSC.2016.2546701
Date of publication: 21 June 2016

Mattisson first discussed Bluetooth
as an example of a technological solution to a real problem, namely a
wireless replacement for short-range
cabling. He then elaborated emerging developments and trends in 5G
as they relate to both high-capacity
cellular and low-power machine-type
communications.
With the cooperation of the Science
Foundation Ireland CONNECT Centre
for Future Networks and Communications (http://www.connectcentre.ie/),
the workshop was live-streamed to
participants in Dublin and Limerick,
as well as being recorded.

Sven Mattisson delivers a lecture at the
Tyndall National Institute.

-Peter Kennedy
Chair,
United Kingdom and Ireland Chapter

German SSCS Chapter Hosts DL Tour at RWTH Aachen University

The German Chapter of the IEEE SolidState Circuits Society (SSCS) recently
hosted a Distinguished Lecturer (DL)
tour to Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule (RWTH Aachen)
University, Germany. The event took
place 16 October 2015 and was organized by Prof. Tobias Noll, chair of
Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science at RWTH Aachen University.
DLs Marian Verhelst and Wim Dehaene,
both from Katholieke Universiteit
(KU) Leuven, Belgium, presented two
lectures on current trends in VLSI circuit design.
In his lecture, "Ultra-Low Energy
DSP, Synonym of Ultra-Low Voltage
DSP?" Prof. Dehaene addressed the hot
topic of low-energy digital signal processing from the angle of power supply voltage. He raised and elaborated
on answers to questions, such as do we
need to lower the supply voltage, how
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSSC.2016.2546702
Date of publication: 21 June 2016

104

s p r i n g 2 0 16

Over 30 attendees listened to exciting lectures on current trends in VLSI circuit design.

low can we go, and is it energy efficient to go as low as possible? Design
examples both from open literature as
well as from his own research, especially on low-energy SRAM, were presented and carefully discussed.
Prof. Marian Verhelst presented
her lecture, "Approximate Sensing
and Computing Toward Always-On
Context-Awareness." She claimed that
emerging mobile electronic devices,
equipped with more and more sen-

IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE

sors and requiring always-on operation, need for a 10x energy improvement. An attractive solution toward
near-zero-power budgets hardware
context-awareness has been identified, where context-information can
be exploited to dynamically tune
hardware configuration and performance to the observed context to save
energy. Special attention was given to
two important building blocks of context-scalable systems: context-aware

http://www.tyndall http://www.connectcentre.ie/

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Spring 2016