IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Spring 2016 - 120

Biblical Mount Sinai. Sinaia is home
to a number of beautiful places:
Peles Royal Castle and Pelisor Castle
(http://visit.peles.ro/), the Cantacuzino Castle (www.cantacuzinocastle.com/), and the Bran Castle (from
the XIV century, recently related to

the famous "Dracula" (www.bran-castle.
com/).
For call for papers and further
information regarding the conference,
please visit the CAS website http://
www.imt.ro/cas/. For additional information, contact us at cas@imt.ro.

-Prof. Dan Dascalu
Member of the Romanian Academy,
CAS General Chair, IMT Bucharest,
Romania
-Prof. Cristian Ravariu
Chair, SSCS37 Romanian Chapter

SSCS-Taipei Chapter Holds Integrated Circuit Design Workshop
on Ultra-Low-Voltage Design in Advanced CMOS Technology

The Taipei Chapter of the IEEE SolidState Circuits Society (SSCS), together
with NTU-MediaTek Wireless Lab,
held a one-day IC design workshop
on ultra-low-voltage (ULV) design
in advanced CMOS technology. The
workshop took place on 30 October
2015 at the National Taiwan University, Taiwan, and attracted more than
200 participants from both industry
and academia.
Four well-known experts from different fields, including analog, digital,
device, and mobile systems on a chip
(SoCs), presented their cutting-edge
research and solutions, as well as their
thoughts on future ULV design challenges and opportunities in this oneday workshop. The workshop began
with the talk "Ultra-Low Power SoC" by
Dr. Uming Ko from MediaTek. Dr. Ko
gave an overview of ULV design from
the system perspective and introduced
several energy-efficient multicore SoC
solutions for mobile applications. He
also used the example of Roberto Carlos's famous "banana shot" to encourage attendees to continue the pursuit
of innovation.
Different from the systematic topdown approach presented in the first
talk, the second talk, "Emerging Device
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSSC.2016.2546778
Date of publication: 21 June 2016

120

s p r i n g 2 0 16

(From left) Prof. Chorng-Kuang Wang, National Taiwan University; Prof. Tzi-Dar Chiueh, National
Taiwan University; Prof. Dennis Sylvester, University of Michigan; Prof. Willy Sansen, KU
Leuven; Dr. Aaron Thean, Imec; Dr. Uming Ko, MediaTek; Prof. Tai-Cheng Lee, National Taiwan
University; and Prof. Tsung-Te Liu, National Taiwan University, at the entrance of the workshop.

for Ultra-Low-Voltage Operation," by
Dr. Aaron Thean from Imec, represented the bottom-up solutions delivered
from the device and technology communities. Dr. Thean broadly reviewed
the concepts of device leakage design
and compared recent CMOS device
technologies and emerging devices for
the upcoming Internet of Everything
infrastructure. He also emphasized
the importance of device-circuit-system
cooptimization to conclude the morning sessions of the workshop.
The afternoon sessions consisted of
two presentations focused on ULV analog and digital IC designs, respectively.
SSCS Distinguished Lecturer Prof. Willy
Sansen from KU Leuven gave the first
talk, "Analog Design Techniques in

IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE

Ultra-Low-Voltage Technologies." Prof.
Sansen presented specific analog design procedures that must be adopted
to encompass different operation regions, ranging from velocity saturation
to strong and weak inversion. He also
described various analog circuit design techniques to mitigate the impact
of noise and distortion. To conclude
his talk, Prof. Sansen encouraged attendees to keep investing in learning,
which is absolutely essential for analog designers.
Prof. Dennis Sylvester from the University of Michigan gave the last presentation of the workshop on ULV digital design, "Voltage Scaled Digital Design: Why
and How." He shard the challenges and
opportunities when dropping supply

http://www.bran-castle http://visit.peles.ro/ http://www.cantacuzinocas http://http:// http://www.tle.com/ http://www.imt.ro/cas/

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