Solid State Circuits Society

Spring 2017 Chapter Activities Report

See the original article from IEEE Solid State Circuits Magazine, Vol. 9, Issue 2 here.

Recent Silicon Valley SSCS Chapter Activities: Seminars, Webinars, and Distinguished Lecturer Talks

by Mojtaba Sharifzadeh, Chapter Chair, Silicon Valley SSCS Chapter

The IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS) Santa Clara Valley (SCV) Chapter held a number of seminars, webinars, and Distinguished Lecturer (DL) talks in fall 2016 and winter 2017 and also sponsored the Silicon Valley Engineering Council (SVEC) Engineers’ Week Banquet in February 2017. This article highlights recent events held and sponsored by the Chapter. Please feel free to contact us if you are interested in presenting at our meetings, would like to attend the Chapter events, or are interested in volunteering.

The IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS) Santa Clara Valley Chapter held a number of seminars, webinars, and Distinguished Lecturer (DL) talks in the summer and fall of 2016. This article is just a highlight of recent events held by the Chapter. Please feel free to contact the SSCS Silicon Valley Chapter if you are interested in presenting at our meetings, would like to attend the Chapter events, or would like to volunteer for the Chapter.

17 November 2017: DL Seminar: Challenges and Design Considerations for High-Efficiency Modern Wireless RFIC Transmitters” by Dr. Osama Shanaa, Mediatek Inc.

On 17 November 2016, Dr. Osama Shanaa, SSCS DL, from Mediatek Inc., held the seminar “Challenges and Design Considerations for High-Efficiency Modern Wireless RFIC Transmitters,” in which he explained his research on high-efficiency power amplifier s ( PA s) with a focus on digital PAs. He showed how digital PAs with their inherently low performance can be linearized to be used for high-performance advanced wireless application in Wi-Fi products. The talk started with an overview of PAs and performance metrics and later focused on high-efficiency digital PAs and their limitations and linearization techniques. Dr. Shanaa concluded his talk by discussing his research group’s state-of-the-art publications at the 2016 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) and their performance metrics compared with other works, proving that digital PAs can be used in high-performance Wi-Fi applications. This seminar attracted many professionals from academia and industry in Silicon Valley and was co-sponsored by the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society.

SCV-SSCS Chapter-Sponsored SVEC Engineers Week Banquet

Every year during Engineers Week in February, the SVEC holds a banquet to honor outstanding individuals for their contributions by welcoming them into the SVEC Hall of Fame. The banquet also features a distinguished keynote speaker and awards several scholarships for academic excellence. The Hall of Fame ceremony recognizes local engineers and academics for their outstanding professional achievements, both in engineering and technology and for significant contributions to the community. The Silicon Valley SSCS Chapter, along with other Societies in San Francisco Bay Area IEEE Section, attends this event and sponsors SVEC scholarships for outstanding students at local colleges in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). This year’s event was held on 22 February 2017 at the Hyatt Hotel in Santa Clara. The keynote speaker was Dale Dougherty, founder and CEO of Maker Media, Inc. The 2017 Hall of Fame inductees are:

• Dr. Chenming Hu, TSMC distinguished professor emeritus, University of California (UC), Berkeley
• Dr. Richard J. Stuart, CEO, ARES Holding Corporation
• Dr. David N.K. Wang, former CEO, SMIC, former EVP, Applied Materials.

The SSCS SVC celebrated its 20th anniversary on 16 March 2017. One of the founding members, Dan Oprica, started the event during the networking session by giving an opening speech on the history of the Chapter. The IEEE SSCS SVC Chapter was the first IEEE SSCS Chapter established in the world in March 1997 and has the largest membership of any SSCS Chapter, with over 2,000 members. In that group, 35 are IEEE Fellows (11 are Life Fellows), 57 are IEEE Life Members (eight are Life Senior Members), and 132 are IEEE Senior Members. The Chapter holds between eight and 11 technical meetings every year, including seminars, short courses, and webinars, attracting thousands of professionals and academics across Silicon Valley. The speakers are experts from industry, professors or Ph.D. candidates from renowned educational institutions, or IEEE DLs from local schools/industry such as Stanford, UC Berkeley, Qualcomm, Intel, Maxim, and ADI. The Chapter website is one of the most visited of all IEEE Chapter sites. In 2004, the Chapter received the IEEE 2004 Solid-State Circuits Society Outstanding Chapter Award, which was presented to Dan Oprica at ISSCC in February 2005. The Chapter has been very active ever since.

After the networking session, Chapter Chair Mojtaba Sharifzadeh welcomed the attendees and talked about IEEE and SSCS membership benefits. He also announced the sponsored and cosponsored 2017 seminars, which include:

• 20 April, Prof. Amin Arbabian, Stanford, Biomedical Applications
• 18 May, Dr. Matt Straayer, Maxim Integrated, Time-Based Circuits—Part 1
• 15 June, Prof. Behzad Razavi, UCLA
• 17 August, Prof. Pavan Hanumolu, University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign, Time-Based Circuits—Part 2
• October 4: Dr. R.B. Staszewski, University College Dublin, Tutorial on Digital PLLs
• October 19: Prof. Bernhard Boser, UC Berkeley.

The textbook Selected Topics in RF, Analog and Mixed-Signal Circuits and Systems, from the 2016 short course held jointly with the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, has been published and is available online for purchase. The book includes the following:

• “Linearity, Time-Variation, Phase Modulation, and Oscillator Phase Noise” by Thomas Lee, Stanford
• “Clock and Timing in Wireline Communications” by Nikola Nedovic, NVIDIA
• “Phase Lock Loop Design Techniques” by B.K. Ahuja, Qualcomm
• “mm-Wave and Terahertz Signal Generation, Synthesis and Amplification: Reaching the Fundamental Limits” by Omeed Momeni, UC Davis
• “Equalization and A/D Conversion for High-Speed Links” by Boris Murmann, Stanford.

For 2017, the SSCS Silicon Valley Chapter, jointly with the IEEE Computer Society Chapter, is planning a comprehensive two-day short course in July: Intelligent Systems: Hardware and Software Perspectives. The first day will cover topics on the hardware side with software topics on the second day; speakers will be from local schools and companies. Finally, the keynote talk was given by SSCS DL Prof. Thomas Lee from Stanford University. Prof. Lee shared his vision on the future of the semiconductor industry in “Silicon Is the New Steel: Building the Internet of Everything—The World’s First Terascale Network.” He started with a history of the semiconductor industry going back to the invention of vacuum tubes and transistors. He showed a pattern of having a new revolution every 20 years and later, with wireless systems and the path we’ve gone over the past two decades since late 1990s with the wireless boom. He explained, despite the general belief that the wireless wave is over, why he still believes the next wave of the Internet of Everything will drive our industry for at least another 20 years. This anniversary seminar was very popular and the tickets were sold out, attracting hundreds of attendees to the Texas Instruments auditorium in Santa Clara.

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