You are cordially invited to attend the 2012 Symposium on VLSI Circuits, to be held on June 13-15, 2012, at the Hilton Hawaiian Village in Honolulu, Hawaii. Following our rich tradition, the Symposium on VLSI Circuits will follow the Symposium on VLSI Technology at the same location.

Once again, the Circuits Symposium will overlap the Technology Symposium for two full days, and allow participants to freely choose to attend papers from either Symposium. This provides a unique opportunity to learn about the latest advances in both VLSI Circuits and Technology. In addition, for the first time, the Symposia offer 8 Technology/Circuits Joint Focus Sessions on the two overlap days. Papers in these sessions cover topics of interest to both the Technology and Circuits communities, and facilitate highly synergistic interactions among them.

The Symposium on VLSI Circuits has established itself as a premier international forum for presenting and exchanging important ideas and major new developments in VLSI circuit design. The scope of the conference includes new concepts in Digital Circuits, Memory and Analog Circuits for Computing, Memory and Communications in Scaled CMOS and Emerging Technologies. Specifically, the Symposium covers advances in low power and high performance circuit designs in scaled CMOS processes for processors and SoC, SRAM, DRAM, Flash and emerging non-volatile memory, power management, DC-DC converters, data converters, clocking, 3D-stacked designs, wireless and wireline communication circuits. Contributions to the Symposium come from both industry and academia, from around the world.

On June 12th, the day before the Circuits Symposium, two all-day Short Courses are offered by distinguished speakers from industry and academia. For one registration fee, participants can attend either of the courses in parallel and switch freely between them. A roundtable discussion will follow to foster interactions and discussions with the speakers. The first course, focusing on challenges related to logic, memory and analog circuit design, is titled “Designing in Advanced CMOS Technologies.” The other course focuses on the power efficiency challenges of mobile platforms and is titled “Ultra Low Power SoC Design for Future Mobile Systems.”

This year, the technical program committee reviewed 386 papers, selecting 97 outstanding papers for presentation at the Circuits Symposium. These papers disclose new and interesting circuits and designs for memory, processor, communication, analog, data conversion, signal processing, power management, medical and automotive electronics. They represent the leading edge of VLSI circuit design.

We have invited two distinguished industry leaders to describe recent advances and new challenges related to VLSI circuits, technology and applications: “The Evolution of Next Generation Data Center Networks for High Capacity Computing” by Nicholas Ilyadis, Vice President & Chief Technology Officer of the Infrastructure and Networking Group at Broadcom, and “Technology Innovations for Smart Cities” by Akira Maeda, Chief Technology Officer of the Infrastructure Systems Company at Hitachi.

To complement the formal talks, we have arranged three evening rump sessions on interesting and provocative topics to give you an opportunity to participate in the discussions and mix with the industry and academic experts offering their viewpoints on important topics. The rump sessions explore “Scaling Challenges Beyond 1xnm DRAM and NAND Flash”, “Is VLSI Innovation Dead?”, “Will the Future Have More Analog or Digital Processing?”.

We have been organizing a luncheon talk for attendees of Circuits and Technology Symposia to enjoy informative and entertaining speeches on interesting topics in a relaxed atmosphere with excellent food. This year, it will feature the talk “Nano Satellites, CubeSats, and the Next Space Generation” by Prof. James Cutler from University of Michigan.

The rich technical content of the program will undoubtedly interest you, and we certainly hope that the Symposium will be a fruitful and enjoyable experience.

We look forward to meeting with you at the Symposium in Honolulu.