National Laboratories (United States),

C.E.R.N. (Switzerland), and Laboratoire du l Accelerateur Lineaire

(France). During 19951997, he held
an industry grant for research in RF
CMOS. In 1997, he was appointed
assistant professor at Universit di
Bergamo, and, in 2000, he joined Universit di Pavia, where he is now a
professor.
Dr. Svelto has been a technical
advisor of RFDomus Inc., a startup he cofounded in 2002 dedicated
to highly integrated GPS receivers.
After merging with Glonav Inc. (Ireland), RFDomus was acquired by NXP
Semiconductors in 2007.
Since 2006, he has been the director of a scientific laboratory, joint
between Universit di Pavia and STMicrolectronics, dedicated to research
in microelectronics, with emphasis
on mm-wave systems for wireless
communications, high-speed serial

links, and ultrasound electronics for

medical diagnostic.
Dr. Svelto has been a member of
the technical program committee of
the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference, Custom Integrated
Circuits Conference, and Bipolar/
BiCMOS Circuits Technology Meeting.
He is presently a member of the technical program committee of the IEEE
European Solid-State Circuits Conference. He served as associate editor
of IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits
(20032007) and as guest editor for
a special issue in the same journal in
March 2003. He is corecipient of the
IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits
2003 Best Paper Award.

Hirotaka Tamura
Hirotaka Tamura received his B.S.,
M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electronic
engineering from Tokyo University,
Tokyo, Japan, in 1977, 1979, and

1982, respectfully.
He joined Fujitsu
Laboratories
in
1982. After being
involved in the
development
of
different exploratory
devices,
such as Josephson junction devices
and high-temperature superconductor devices, he moved into the field of
CMOS high-speed signaling in 1996.
His first contribution to this area was
in the designing of a receiver frontend for DRAM-to-processor communications. Then, he got involved in
the development of a multichannel
high-speed I/O for server interconnects. Since then, he has been working in the area of architecture- and
transistor-level design for CMOS highspeed signaling circuits.
Compiled by Katherine Olstein

Winners of SSCS Predoctoral Achievement Awards and Student Travel

Grants Widen Horizons at 5th Annual ISSCC Student Research Preview
Keynoter Nicky Lu Hails Mentor James Meindl in Opening Address

In a keynote speech highlighting

memorable periods and players in
his distinguished career, Dr. Nicky
Lu inspired and energized student
research preview (SRP) presenters
and listeners with words of career
wisdom and a tribute to his Stanford
mentor, James Meindl. According to
SRP Program Chair Jan Van der Spiegel, The students were fascinated
and loved it.
My hard study was rewarded
with the chance to join the Stanford IC Lab, where I met many topnotch researchers in the field. In
my doctoral research I am really
indebted to Prof. Jim Meindl and
Prof. Jim Plummer, and Dr. Levy
Gerzberg, who not only trained my
research skills but also opened my
eyes wide to see entrepreneurship

and related actions in the Silicon

Valley. Almost growing with the
IC industry, Prof. Meindl today is
still doing research and supervising graduate students at George
Tech. He is truly a role model for
everyone here, as a hero with wisdom, strength, and dedication to
education!

Dr. Lus remarks Research with

Innovation Is Power for Career
Growth also included astute and
lofty advice:
In battles, we need a warrior,
fighter, and hero in order to win, such
as General MacArthur. In semiconductor industry competitions, his kind
of heroism belongs to researchers,

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSSC.2013.2254629

Date of publication: 17 June 2013

Dr. Nicky Lu, chair and CEO of Etron Technologies, Taiwan, keynoting the ISSCC 2013 SRP.

IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE

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55

Inspired to Be an Entrepreneur Through Research at Stanford

A General in the IC Industry:

Researcher, Inventor and Entrepreneur

Lus Ph.D. Dissertation (1981) Signed by

Jim Meindl (2006 IEEE Medal of Honor)

Duty

An Entrepreneur in Academia:
Created the Stanford IC Lab and the Center
of Integrated System (CIS); Built the Georgia
Tech Microelectronic Center
Jim Plummer
Dean of Stanford
Engineering
School
A Ph.D. Student of Meindl

Honor

Levy Gerzberg
Founder and CEO, Zoran
A Ph.D. Student of Meindl

Attended the Entrepreneurship Class,

First Started in 1980 by the School of Engineering

inventors, and entrepreneurs due to

their creations, such as Shockley, Widlar, and Noyce, all of whose careers
started with research. Im using my
dream to encourage all of you: Be a
general in our IC industry and in your
life! General MacArthur requested soldiers to take duty, honor, and country
as their lifelong commitment. Likewise, we as IC engineers are fighting
all the time to create new IC chips,
based on wisdom, strength, and serving customers and humanity! We are
lucky because, in our profession, we
can have work and fun at the same
time through truth finding, value
creation, and/or sharing wealth. It
is worthwhile to be aggressive as a
dedicated researcher who is full of
passion in search for innovations and

Country

Customer
and
Humanity

Wisdom

Strength

Truth Finding, Value Creation, and Wealth Sharing

to create new inventions and products. Taking research with innovation

is a wonderful start, just like sowing
good soil for your career trees: there
are many fruits waiting for you as a
professor, inventor, entrepreneur, or
executive. You and I are lucky because
we are capable of doing research and
having a chance to be a hero!

SRP Presentations
Arresting and Diverse
According to SRP committee member, UC Davis Prof. Bevan Baas, the
highly diverse subfields of the contributors this year gave additional
value to the poster component of
the 2013 program. During the poster
demo, which took place in the massive ballroom adjacent to the locale

of the formal presentations, SRP

committee members ranked the presentations in real time for creativity,
significance, and clarity.
All were excellent, said Prof. Baas,
but in the final analysis, A Fully
Self-Powered Hybrid Sheet Based on
CMOS ICs and Large-Area Electronics for Large-Scale Strain Sensing by
Yingzhe Hu of Princeton University
was declared the best.
Honorable mentions went to
Design and Demonstration of Scaled
MEM Relay Multipliers, by Hossein
Fariborzi of MIT and A 12-b 50-MS/S
2.1-mW SAR ADC with Redundancy
and Digital Calibration, by Albert
Chang of MIT.
Compiled by Katherine Olstein

SRP presenters and attendees, front row (from the right): Lingkai Kong, Wei Deng, Ba-Ro-Saim Sung, Peyman Nazari, Yi Xziong, Ping-Chuan
Chiang [Student Travel Grant Awards (STGA)], K.R. Raghunandan (University of Texas, Austin), James Lin, Zushu Yan, and Chao Chen. Middle
row (from the right): Li Sun, Jaeha Kim (SRP Committee), Jiashu Chen, Xiaotie Wu (sixth from right), Rakesh Kumar, Anantha Chandrakasan,
Jan Van der Spiegel, Kenneth (KC) Smith, Nicky Lu, Ahmed Musa, and Tsung-Hsien Lin. Back row (second from the right): Bryan Ackland,
Hanh-Phuc Le, Bevan Baas, Yi-Pin Lu, Richard Dorrance, Muhammad Awais Ben Altaf, Seong-Jong Kim; 11th from right, Vincent Gaudet, Shahriar Mirabbasi, Ingrid Verbauwhede, Jeff Weldon, Seong Hwan Cho, Ruonan Han, I-Ting Lee, and Laura Fujino.

56

s p r i n g 2 0 13

IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE

17 SSCS Student Members Win ISSCC Travel Grants

17 promising graduate-level student engineers benefitted from a Society program established in 2010 by receiving stipends for travel to and
from ISSCC 2013. Eight presented their work in conference program
sessions and six presented abstracts at the SRP. According to STGA
Program Coordinators Tzi-Dar Chiueh and Bryan Ackland, This years
group of awardees were evaluated against a number of criteria that
included their academic record, their goals and progress to date in their
research program, the recommendation of their supervising professor,
and their ability to articulate the value they see in attending the conference. Some preference was given to students who were already presenting at the conference or had been selected for the SRP. STGA 2013
recipients were:

Muhammad Awais Bin Altaf: Masdar Institute of Science
and Technology
Chao Chen: Delft University of Technology
Ping-Chuan Chiang: National Taiwan University
Richard Dorrance: University of California, Los Angeles

Nankoo Serge Georges John: National University of Singapore

Ruonan Han: Cornell University
Mehdi Kiani: Georgia Institute of Technology
SeongJong Kim: Columbia University
James Lin: Tokyo Institute of Technology
Yi-Pin Lu: National Taiwan University
Peyman Nazari: University of California, Irvine
K.R. Raghunandan: University of Texas at Austin
Li Sun: University of California, Santa Barbara

Ba-Ro-Saim Sung: Korea Advanced Institute of Science and
Technology
Xiao Tie Wu: University of Pennsylvania
YI Xiang: Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Xiaoyang Zhang: National University of Singapore.
Information about STGA application dates for ISSCC 2014 and other
SSCS-sponsored conferences is at http://sscs.ieee.org/awards/studenttravel-grants.html.

Session I: Data Converters and Analog Circuit Techniques

Session Cochairs: Andrea Baschirotto and Shahriar Mirabbasi
Vanessa Chen, Carnegie Mellon University, United States
Ba-Ro-Saim Sung, KAIST, Korea
Albert Chang, MIT, United States
Kaita Imai, Shizuoka University, Japan
ZuleXu, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
Zushu Yan, University of Macau, Macau
Aatmesh Shrivastava, University of Virginia, United States
Li Sun, University of California, Santa Barbara, United States.
Given that most physical signals are analog in nature, analog circuits and
data converter blocks are critical in a wide range of applications. The
exciting work in progress in these areas was the focus of the first SRP
session at ISSCC 2013.
The first speaker was Vanessa Chen of Carnegie Mellon University,
who presented a low-power 20-GS/s time-interleaved ADC in a 32-nm
SOI CMOS technology. The ADC also incorporates background calibration. Consuming only 68 mW from a 0.9-V supply, this ADC is expected
to achieve the best figure of merit in its class.
The second presenter, Ba-Ro-Saim Sung, from KAIST, presented a
flash-assisted time-interleaved successive-approximation register ADC
that achieves superior area and power efficiency. A prototype 6-b 2-GS/s
ADC is implemented in a 45-nm CMOS technology and consumes a total
of 14.4 mW from a 1.2-V supply.
The third presenter, Albert Chang, from MIT, presented a 12-bit 50-MS/s
SAR ADC that uses a new redundancy approach as well as a background
calibration technique to achieve ultra-low-power. A 65-nm CMOS proofof-concept prototype consumes 2.09 mW from a 1.2-V supply.
The fourth presenter, Kaita Imai, from Shizuoka University, presented a
14-b two-step single-slope ADC structure that is specifically designed for

CMOS image sensors, and uses time-to-amplitude converter to improve

resolution. A prototype chip is designed in a 0.11-m CMOS image sensor process.
In the fifth presentation, Zule Xu, from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, presented new techniques including using continuous-time integrator and voltage quantizer to achieve a high-resolution time-to-digital
converter. A prototype chip is designed in a 90-nm CMOS and achieves a
resolution of 1 ps (with 9-bit accuracy) and consumes 26.8 mW.
Switching gears from data-conversion structures to analog techniques,
the sixth presenter, Zushu Yan, from the University of Macau, proposed
interesting techniques such as capacitor-multiplier compensation and
transconductance boosting to design an extremely compact and lowpower three-stage amplifier. The amplifier is intended for large-capacitive-load applications such as liquid-crystal display panels. An 0.18-m
CMOS prototype occupies only 0.0064 mm2 and 12.6 W.
The seventh presenter, Aatmesh Shrivastava, from the University of
Virginia, presented a single-inductor highly efficient energy harvesting
and power management circuit that provides boost conversion for energy
harvesting and three buck converters supplying 3.3, 1.5, and 1.2-V with
a peak load current of 10 mA on each converter. A prototype design is
fabricated in a 0.13-m CMOS process.
The last presenter of the session, Li Sun, from the University of California at Santa Barbara, presented an energy-efficient optical receiver front
end that extensively uses current-mode logic along with shunt peaking
to achieve a high bandwidth. Several other techniques such as utilizing T-coil multiple peaking network incorporating bond-wire inductance,
and clock-and-data recovery with embedded equalization are used. A
prototype 26-Gb/s front end, implemented in 65-nm CMOS, draws 139
mA from a single 1-V supply.
Shahriar Mirabbasi

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Session II: Circuits and Systems for Biomedical Applications

Session Cochairs: Seong Hwan Cho and Tsung-Hsien Lin
Jing Guo, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology,
Hong Kong
Woojae Lee, KAIST, Korea
Mehdi Kiani, Georgia Institute of Technology, United States
Chirag Sthalekar, Tufts University, United States
Kevin Mazurek, Johns Hopkins University, United States
Shu-Yu Hsu, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
Xiaoyang Zhang, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Wala Saadeh, Masdar Institute of Science and Technology,
U.A.E.

Session II of SRP consisted of eight poster presentations that covered various aspects of biomedical circuits and systems. The cross-discipline nature of
the biomedical researches presented a unique challenge to the participating
students, for they must understand the underlying biomedical problems while
proposing innovative circuit and system solutions. However, this emerging
field also offers the students a unique opportunity to explore new research
frontier. The research works presented in this session include biosignal sensing and acquisition techniques, signal processing and analysis algorithms,
power delivery circuits, and system integration. All these works have shown
that the students have good grasps on the issues that they are solving and also
demonstrated well-thought circuit and system design techniques.
Tsung-Hsien Lin

Session III: Memory, Digital, MEMS, and PLL IPs

Session Cochairs: Dejan Markovic and Vincent Gaudet
Richard Dorrance, University of California, Los Angeles,
United States
Magdalena Sihotang, Research Institute of Electrical
Communication, Tohoku University, Japan
Changhung Tsai, NCTU, Taiwan
Yi-Pin Lu, NTU, Taiwan
Yingzhe Hu, Princeton University, United States
Hossein Fariborzi, MIT, United States
Young-Seok Park, Yonsei University, Korea.

The final session covered advances in memory, digital, MEMS, and PLL
technology. Seven presentations covered exciting topics such as spintronic and MEM-relay devices for next-generation digital architectures,
innovations in multimedia signal processing, and PLL design. One paper
reported on techniques to sense strain in bridges. Students represented
universities from the United States, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. We look
forward to seeing these outstanding students give presentations in regular
sessions at future ISSCCs!
Vincent Gaudet and Dejan Markovic

Eight Granted SSCS Predoctoral Achievement Awards for 20122013

The IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society

(SSCS) Awards Committee chaired
by John C. Corcoran chose eight
outstanding doctoral-level graduate
students for the SSCS Predoctoral
Achievement Awards of 20122013:
from the University of California,
Berkeley, Jiashu Chen, an advisee of Prof. Ali Niknejad; Lingkai
Kong, an advisee of Prof. Elad
Alon; and Hanh-Phuc Le, who is
advised by Prof. Elad Alon and
Prof. Seth Sanders
Wei Deng and Ahmed Musa, both
mentored by Prof. Kenichi Okada

of the Department of Physical

Electronics, Graduate School of
Science and Engineering, Tokyo
Institute of Technology
Ruonan Han, whose advisor is
Prof. Ehsan Afshariat at the Cornell University, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
I-Ting Lee, a student of Prof.
Shen-Iuan Liu, National Taiwan
University
Kamran Souri, who studies with
Prof. Kofi Makinwa at Delft University, School of Technology.

Jiashu Chen
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSSC.2013.2254630
Date of publication: 17 June 2013

58

s p r i n g 2 0 13

Jiashu Chen is a Ph.D. candidate at

the University of California, Berkeley,

IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE

Electrical
Engineering and Co-
mputer Science
Department. He
is also an active
researcher at the
Berkeley Wireless
Research Center,
which is devoted to the design and
implementation of next-generation
wireless systems in computers and
mobile devices through the use of
state-of-the-art technologies.
His research focuses primarily
on integrated circuits operating at
radio frequencies. However, he is also
investigating the feasibility of low-cost
circuits operating at millimeter-wave