IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Winter 2017 - 55

Ireland were reviewed by their respective
Chapter chairs. Highlights included
distinguished lecturer visits, local technical conferences cosponsored by SSCS
Chapters, meetings with academia and
industry, and short courses organized
by the local Chapters.

The next Chapter Chairs meeting will be held in Region 10 in conjunction with the Asian Solid-State
Circuits Conference in November
2016, and the worldwide meeting
of all SSCS Chapter chairs will take
place at the International Solid-

State Circuits Conference in February 2017.

-Stefan Rusu
IEEE Fellow and
SSCS Chapter Coordinator

Historic Memorandum of Understanding Signing at ESSCIRC

For 42 years, the European Solid-State
Device Research Conference (ESSDERC) and the European Solid-State
Circuits Conference (ESSCIRC) have
provided an annual European forum
for the presentation and discussion
of recent advances in solid-state
devices and circuits. While keeping separate Technical Program
Committees, ESSCIRC and ESSDERC
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSSC.2016.2622939
Date of publication: 23 January 2017

Jo De Boeck (left center), 2017 chair of ESSCIRC, and SSCS President Jan Van der Spiegel (right
center) sign the document as SSCS volunteers and ESSCIRC committee members look on.

A BRIEf HIStoRy on How ESSCIRC BECAmE An IEEE ConfEREnCE
When I attended the first European Solid-State Circuits Conference
(ESSCIRC) in Canterbury in September 1975, the European SolidState Devices Conference (ESSDERC) was in its fifth edition. They
were organized in two different places somewhere in Europe, during two consecutive weeks in the middle of September. It was an
initiative by Lew Terman and other members of the IEEE. From the
very beginning, a guest editor was appointed to select the best papers for publication in IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits (JSSC).
Since 2003, ESSCIRC and ESSDERC have been organized together
in mid September and held in Estoril, Portugal. The idea of two
concurrent conferences is shared with VLSI Technology and VLSI
Circuits, which are organized together as well. Similar to the Asian
Solid-State Circuits Conference, the conferences are organized in a
different country each year. Continuity is thus not always obvious.
At first, ESSCIRC was a technically cosponsored conference. The organization and finances were always the responsibility of the local organization. In addition, the program chair and a large fraction of the Technical Program Committee changed each year, and a lot was dependent on
the country in which the conference was held.
Today, ESSCIRC has a full JSSC special issue. Moreover, all conference papers appear in IEEE Xplore. With the help of Bill Redman-White,
the papers of the first conferences were added to IEEE Xplore in 2008.
To maintain this level of high quality, better control of the review of
the papers has become necessary. This is why the conference has been
converted into a financially sponsored conference. As part of the IEEE,
continuity is better guaranteed, ensuring quality by continuity.

To prepare and facilitate this transition, several European members
of the International Solid-State Circuits Conference Technical Program
Committee met each year in San Francisco in conjunction with the
conference-usually on one of the early mornings. I used to call them
"friends of ESSCIRC." Several of these committee members were also
members of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS) Administrative
Committee (AdCom). This is how a consensus has grown on the transition towards a full-IEEE conference. After many meetings, a proposal
was put on the agenda of an AdCom meeting. The motion was put
forward by Kenneth O, the chair of the SSCS Meetings Committee,
on Sunday, 31 January 2016, and it passed. The vote was overwhelmingly positive.
The AdCom had attended the ESSCIRC conference already several
times and were quite familiar with its organization and the review process of papers. They had learned about the ESSCIRC during AdCom
meetings of earlier years, by ESSCIRC representatives such as Franz
Dielacher, Bill Redman-White, Roland Thewes, Bram Nauta, and, most
recently, the present chair of the ESSCIRC-ESSDERC Steering Committee, Andreia Cathelin. These people have been actively involved in preparing this transition.
The actual signatures of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society President
Jan Van der Spiegel and the chair of the ESSCIRC-ESSDERC Steering
Committee Andreia Cathelin were put down on a new memorandum
of understanding the day before the last ESSCIRC 2016 conference in
Lausanne, Switzerland.
-Willy Sansen

IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE

W i n t e r 2 0 17

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Winter 2017