Solid State Circuits Society

November 15, 2007

Our speaker was   Jan M. Rabaey, (Scientific Director Berkeley Wireless Research Center), and the topic of his presentation was  ” Scaling the Power Wall“

Abstract

Although power concerns have been at the forefront for the last decade, they’ve always been considered a second rate citizen with respect to other design metrics. Today however, few will dispute that CMOS has entered the “power-limited scaling regime”, with power dissipation becoming the limiting factor on what can be integrated on a chip and how fast it can run. Even more, the feasibility of some exciting and paradigm-shifting applications is totally determined by the availability of energy, and hence can be labeled “energy-starved”.

Many approaches have been introduced to address the concerns regarding both active and standby power. Yet none of these provides a persistent answer that extends into the foreseeable future. Getting to the next step will require us to venture in new directions, some of which may be quite unorthodox. In this presentation, a “roadmap” for low-power design for the next decade will be outlined. For each of the roadmap stages, examples of research results, as currently being conducted at universities and research institutes worldwide, will be shown to illustrate the potential.
BiographyJan M. Rabaey Jan Rabaey received his EE and Ph.D degrees in applied sciences from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. From 1983-1985, he was connected to UC Berkeley as a Visiting Research Engineer and from 1985-1987, he was a research manager at IMEC, Belgium. In 1987, he joined the faculty of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department of the University of California, Berkeley, where he now holds the Donald O. Pederson Distinguished Professorship. From 1999 until 2002, he was the Associate Chair of the EECS Department at UC Berkeley. He is currently the scientific co-director of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC), as well as the director of the MARCO Gigascale Systems Research Center (GSRC). He is an IEEE Fellow.

Prof. Rabaey serves on the technical advisory board of a range of companies and research institutes focused in the areas of design automation, semiconductor intellectual property and wireless systems.

His current research interests include the conception and implementation of next-generation integrated wireless systems.

Welcome

Calendar

Next Meeting

Search Previous Events