CIRCUITS RUMP SESSION

Thursday, June 14

8:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m.

Organizers: J. Zerbe, Rambus

K. Agawa, Toshiba

R1: Is VLSI Innovation Dead?

Moderator: J. Zerbe, Rambus

Since the 90’s the drop-off in venture-capitalist funded semiconductor startups has been noticeably precipitous. Between the burst of the internet bubble and the economic slowdown, IC companies seem like they are taking a back seat. Headlines touting innovative companies are now dominated by web software or server/OEMs with chip companies noticeably absent. Memory has matured, processors have matured, even networking and performance graphics has matured. Attend any conference with a grizzled IC veteran and you may hear the standard refrain “it’s all been done before”. The question is: is VLSI semiconductor innovation fine, dead, dying, or does it just need some kind of kick-start?

Panelists:

M. Horowitz, Stanford

S. Kawahito, Shizuoka Univ.

S. Kosonocky, AMD

H. Lee, MIT

H. Morimura, NTT

G. Shahidi, IBM

I. Young, Intel

R2: Will the Future Have More Analog or Digital Processing?

Organizers: B. Ginsburg, Texas Instruments

M. Takamiya, University of Tokyo

Moderator: B. Ginsburg, Texas Instruments

Since the early days of DSP, traditional analog functionality has been increasingly replaced by digital circuits, due to added flexibility, robustness, and the promise of smaller area and lower power operation. The extent of digital has progressed commensurate with the ability to efficiently digitize signals. ADC energy efficiency has improved by more than 500x over the last decade, such that it can be more efficient to generate bits than actually process them in the digital domain. Given new technology nodes do not exhibit the same digital energy scaling as experienced in the past, will real energy-constrained systems become increasingly analog in their partitioning? Is the push towards digital replacing analog finished, or is the overall trend irreversible?

Panelists:

E. Alon, Univ. of California, Berkeley

M. Ikeda, University of Tokyo

T. Miki, Renesas Electronics

A. Momtaz, Broadcom

K. Nakamura, Analog Devices

J. Savoj, Xilinx