IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE spring 20 13 55

National Laboratories (United States), C.E.R.N. (Switzerland), and Labo-ratoire du l’ Accelerateur Lineaire (France). During 1995–1997, he held an industry grant for research in RF CMOS. In 1997, he was appointed assistant professor at Università di Bergamo, and, in 2000, he joined Uni-versità di Pavia, where he is now a professor.

Dr. Svelto has been a technical advisor of RFDomus Inc., a start-up he cofounded in 2002 dedicated to highly integrated GPS receivers. After merging with Glonav Inc. (Ire-land), RFDomus was acquired by NXP Semiconductors in 2007.

Since 2006, he has been the direc-tor of a scientific laboratory, joint between Università di Pavia and STMi-crolectronics, 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 Cir-cuits Conference, Custom Integrated Circuits Conference, and Bipolar/BiCMOS Circuits Technology Meeting. He is presently a member of the tech-nical program committee of the IEEE European Solid-State Circuits Confer-ence. He served as associate editor of IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits (2003–2007) 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 TamuraHirotaka 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 explor-atory devices,

such as Josephson junction devices and high-temperature superconduc-tor 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 front-end for DRAM-to-processor commu-nications. Then, he got involved in the development of a multichannel high-speed I/O for server intercon-nects. Since then, he has been work-ing in the area of architecture- and transistor-level design for CMOS high-speed signaling circuits.

—Compiled by Katherine Olstein

Winners of SSCS Predoctoral Achievement Awards and Student Travel Grants Widen Horizons at 5th Annual ISSCC Student Research PreviewKeynoter Nicky Lu Hails Mentor James Meindl in Opening Address

IIn 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 Spie-gel, “The students were fascinated and loved it.”

“My hard study was rewarded with the chance to join the Stan-ford IC Lab, where I met many top-notch 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 supervis-ing graduate students at George Tech. He is truly a role model for everyone here, as a hero with wis-dom, strength, and dedication to education!”

Dr. Lu’s 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 semiconduc-tor 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.

56 spring 20 13 IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE

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, Shah-riar Mirabbasi, Ingrid Verbauwhede, Jeff Weldon, Seong Hwan Cho, Ruonan Han, I-Ting Lee, and Laura Fujino.

inventors, and entrepreneurs due to their creations, such as Shockley, Wid-lar, and Noyce, all of whose careers started with research. I’m using my dream to encourage all of you: Be a general in our IC industry and in your life! General MacArthur requested sol-diers to take duty, honor, and country as their lifelong commitment. Like-wise, we as IC engineers are fighting all the time to create new IC chips, based on wisdom, strength, and serv-ing 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

to create new inventions and prod-ucts. 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 DiverseAccording to SRP committee mem-ber, UC Davis Prof. Bevan Baas, the highly diverse subfields of the con-tributors this year gave additional value to the poster component of the 2013 program. During the poster demo, which took place in the mas-sive ballroom adjacent to the locale

of the formal presentations, SRP committee members ranked the pre-sentations 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 Electron-ics 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

An Entrepreneur in Academia:Created the Stanford IC Lab and the Centerof Integrated System (CIS); Built the GeorgiaTech Microelectronic Center

Jim PlummerDean of StanfordEngineeringSchoolA Ph.D. Student of Meindl

Levy GerzbergFounder and CEO, ZoranA Ph.D. Student of Meindl

Attended the Entrepreneurship Class,First Started in 1980 by the School of Engineering

Lu’s Ph.D. Dissertation (1981) Signed byJim Meindl (2006 IEEE Medal of Honor)

Inspired to Be an Entrepreneur Through Research at Stanford A General in the IC Industry:Researcher, Inventor and Entrepreneur

Truth Finding, Value Creation, and Wealth Sharing

Duty

Country

Customerand

Humanity

Strength

Wisdom

Honor

IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE spring 20 13 57

17 SSCS STUDENT MEMBERS WIN ISSCC TRAVEL GRANTS

17 promising graduate-level student engineers benefitted from a Soci-ety 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 year’s 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 confer-ence. Some preference was given to students who were already pre-senting 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/student-travel-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 calibra-tion. 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 proof-of-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-µm CMOS image sen-sor process.

In the fifth presentation, Zule Xu, from the Tokyo Institute of Tech-nology, presented new techniques including using continuous-time inte-grator 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 low-power three-stage amplifier. The amplifier is intended for large-capaci-tive-load applications such as liquid-crystal display panels. An 0.18-µm CMOS prototype occupies only 0.0064 mm2 and 12.6 µW.

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-µm CMOS process.

The last presenter of the session, Li Sun, from the University of Califor-nia 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 utiliz-ing 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

58 spring 20 13 IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE

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 vari-ous 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 sens-ing 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 spin-tronic 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 2012–2013

TThe 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 2012–2013:

■ from the University of California, Berkeley, Jiashu Chen, an advi-see 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 Cor-nell University, School of Electri-cal 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 Uni-versity, School of Technology.

Jiashu ChenJiashu Chen is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley,

Electrical Engi-neering 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

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSSC.2013.2254630

Date of publication: 17 June 2013