2015 Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits

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Technology Plenary Session

Tuesday Morning, June 16, 2015

“Robotics for Innovation,” Hirohisa Hirukawa, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)

Robotics has been expected to solve serious social problems including the lack of labor population and the increase of senior persons in Japan for recent years. It is estimated that several hundred million dollars have been invested annually for the research and development of robots in the past decade by robotic industries in Japan. The Japanese Government is going to start five years plan towards another industrial revolution by robotic technologies and will invest a comparable amount of the investment with the private sectors. This talk overview the recent research and development of robots mainly in Japan, tries to flush out their promising applications as well as the expectation for VLSI technologies from the robotics.

“System Challenges and Hardware Requirements for Future Consumer Devices : From Wearable to ChromeBooks and Devices in-between,”
Eric Shiu and Simon Prakash, Google

Internet and mobile application have been driving force for semiconductor innovation in the past 10 years. It's also known that memory and energy walls have been limiting the end-user's perceivable performance. We will focus on the system requirement for today and future's consumer device, such as notebook, tablet, watch, glass or thermostat. Let's start with the user's desire for speed, simplicity and security at the application level, such as video capture, YouTube streaming, Hangout video call, online banking or fitness. Then break it down to what it means to programmers, system architects, technologists and engineers. Finally, a few future research areas in memory architecture, technology and circuit design will be discussed.

Circuits Plenary Session

Wednesday Morning, June 17, 2015

“Profiting From IoT: The Key is Very-Large-Scale Happiness Integration,” Kazuo Yano, Senior Chief Researcher, Hitachi, Ltd.

Big data without link to value is merely a cost. We have studied how to profit from data with Internet-of-Things technologies for over 10 years to reach the answer: the Wearable Happiness Meter. It allows us to integrate the measure of both wellbeing and productivity of 7-billion people worldwide, which was the dream of the 18th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham, numeration of the greatest happiness of the greatest number to measure the right and wrong. Knowing right and wrong with the 10x speed over conventional financial feedback accelerates the growth of the enterprise, the economy, and the individual to maximize the worldwide happiness. Here the integration is not only on the chip, but in the distributed massive chips embedded in the society.

Kazuo Yano, Senior Chief Researcher, Hitachi Ltd.

Kazuo Yano received the B. S., M. S., and Ph. D degrees from Waseda University, Japan, in 1982, 1984, 1993, respectively. From 1991 to 1992, he was a Visiting Scientist at the Arizona State University. He is nowa Senior Chief Researcher at Central Research Laboratory, Hitachi Ltd.

He is known for the pioneering works in semiconductor field, such as CPL, one of the best energy-efficient logic circuit families, and the world-first room-temperature single-electron memories. In 2003, he has expanded activities to measurement and analysis of social big data using wearable sensors called "business microscope" and "life microscope." It was much earlier than the term "big data" was coined. The former has been introduced in a Harvard Business Review as the pioneering work among "the Wearables: A History". His has collaborated with psychology Professor Sonja Lyubomirsky and Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on quantifying the happiness and flow by using wearable sensors. He has applied over 350 patents and his papers are cited by over 2900 papers.

He received 1994 IEEE Paul Rappaport Award, 1996 IEEE Lewis Winner Award, 1998 IEEE Jack Raper Award, Kujin Award from Hitachi Henjinkai in 1995, 2007 Mind, Brain and Education Erize Prize, the Best Paper Award of International Conference on Social Informatics 2012.

He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a member of the Japan Society of Applied Physics, the Physical Society of Japan, the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence and the IEICE of Japan. He is serving on the External Advisory Board Member of the IEEE Spectrum. He served on Technical Program Committee Members of IEDM, DAC, ASSCC, ASP-DAC, SPOTS and EmNet. He is the Symposium Co-Chairman/Chairman of 2008/2009 Symposium on VLSI Circuits. He is the Executive Member of the Hitachi Henjinkai.

“Automated Driving - Impacts on the Vehicle Architecture,” Michael Fausten, Vice President of system development for automated driving and connectivity
Robert Bosch GmbH

Automated Driving is currently one of the major trends in automotive industry. Almost every car maker has published a roadmap towards introducing automated driving in vehicles of their brand. Introduction of significant highly automated vehicles is expected within the next 10 years. Highly automated driving implies significant challenges to future control units. On the one hand side high performance is required to host the upcoming sophisticated SW which will evaluate the information of a multi sensor set, evaluate and interpret the current driving situation and finally take the decision about the vehicle behavior. On the other hand side, the control units have to be designed highly reliable and need to be composed into a fail operational vehicle architecture. The presentation will highlight the requirements for future electrical and electronics architectures of highly automated vehicles and discuss approaches how to fulfill these requirements.

Michael Fausten, Vice President of system development for automated driving and connectivity, Robert Bosch GmbH

Dr. Michael Fausten is Vice President of system development at Chassis Systems Control in Robert Bosch GmbH in Abstatt, Germany and is leading the project for automated driving. Since 2001 he is managing the development of networked chassis systems such as Vehicle Dynamics Management (VDM) and Combined Active and Passive Safety (CAPS). From 1998 until 2001, Dr. Fausten worked on manufacturing of electro motors at Robert Bosch in Toluca, Mexico. He studied physics at the University of Bonn and received a doctorate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Berlin, Germany.

NOTE: The presenter of Circuits Plenary session has been changed from Dr. Michael Fausten to Mr. Christian Bräuchle, Robert Bosch GmbH

Joint Evening Panel Discussion

Tuesday Evening, June 16, 2015, 20:00-22:00

Semiconductor Industry in 2020 : Evolution or Revolution?

Organizers:
M. Yamaoka, Hitachi, Ltd. / A. Molnar, Cornell University / N. Sugii, Hitachi, Ltd. / G. Jurczak, IMEC

Moderators:
Julian Tham, Broadcom / T. Piliszczuk, SOITEC

Panelists:
O. Nalamasu, Applied Materials
J. Hausner, Intel Mobile
S. Tanaka, Murata
T. Yamauchi, Renesas
S. Sivaram, SanDisk
C. Diaz, TSMC
W. Dai, VeriSilicon

Emerging markets such as IoT, M2M, and Big Data analysis will change the game rules of semiconductor industry in 2020. What kind of business models will be required for the players? It is becoming difficult for the Integrated Device Manufacturers (IDM) to make profits simply by fabricating devices. Not only the hardware, but services or solutions becomes more and more important. On the other hand, big players begins to put great effort on the LSI design and acquire many semiconductor design houses. Will the fabless be the best style in 2020? How foundry business will change? Panelists will present their opinions on this topic and discuss what is semiconductor industry in 2020.

Technology Evening Panel Discussion

Tuesday Evening, June 16, 2015, 20:00-22:00

Post scaling: What will be next?

Organizers:
N. Sugii, Hitachi, Ltd. / G. Jurczak, IMEC

Moderators:
A. Nishiyama, Toshiba Corporation / F. Boeuf, STMicroelectronics

Panelists:
M. Vinet, CEA-LETI
E. Shiu, Google
A. Kumar, IBM
A. Thean, IMEC
J. Ohta, Nara Institute of Science & Technology
T. Mogami, PETRA
S. Mitra, Stanford University

Continuous efforts have been made to extend the scaling of ULSIs for the enhancement of the performance of the devices. However, it is also true that the end of the scaling of MOSFETs and BEOL interconnect is coming in near future. Since it is believed that continuous performance improvements as well as new values of LSI systems are required even in the era of post-scaling, we have to find new ways to improve and extend the function of LSIs and those efforts could lead to the innovation of electronics. Considering the issue mentioned above, we invited several experts ranging from material and device level to system and architecture level. We would like to use this opportunity to discuss on 'What is the next? (What is the post-scaling technology?)' together with participants all over the world.

Circuits Evening Panel Discussion

Thursday Evening, June 18, 2015, 20:00-22:00

Is university circuit design research and education keeping up with industry needs?

Organizers:
P. Yue, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology / R. Navid, Rambus Incorporated

Moderators:
P. Yue, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Panelists:
B. Sheu, TSMC
A. Matsuzawa, Tokyo Institute of Technology
K. Asada, The University of Tokyo
L. Loh, MediaTek Inc.
K. Makinwa, Delft University of Technology
S. Borkar, Intel Corporation
V. Stojanovic, University of California, Berkeley

As traditional circuit design reaches a higher level of maturity, the role of educational institutions is changing. For new graduate students entering the field, system-level research that caters to novel emerging applications provides an attractive alternative to traditional circuit-focused topics for PhD dissertations. In response to this paradigm shift, some institutions have opted to slow down faculty hiring in traditional circuit design areas in favor of emerging technologies and applications including 3D IC, MEMS, bio-technology, wearable electronics and internet of things. Is this trend detrimental to the industry as it is still very much in need of constant flow of fresh circuits talent? A panel of experts from industry and academia will tackle this question along with other concerns such as: Is it necessary for students to carry out their circuit research in advanced technologies or should they focus on just fundamentals? Are professors training students to design ICs for better Figure of Merits or to be creative designers?

Wearable Electronics: still an oasis or just a mirage for the semiconductor industry?

Organizers:
Y. Shu, MediaTek Inc. / N. Verma, Princeton University

Moderators:
N. Verma, Princeton University

Panelists:
K. Yano, Hitachi, Ltd.
T. Someya, The University of Tokyo
H.-J. Yoo, KAIST
K. Vasanth, Texas Instruments Inc.
D. Blaauw, University of Michigan
L. Krishnamurthy, Intel Corporation
S.J. Kim, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.

Wearable devices have been on the mind of the semiconductor industry for several years now. The vision was of a highly sensorized human, with electronic devices providing localized, always-available functionality for a range of applications, including medical, health and wellness, lifestyle, etc. But, has this vision panned out? Is the technology there? Was there any application-level value to begin with? What is the relationship with broader sensing visions (e.g., IoT)? The collective wisdom of industrial and academic research over the last five years has made some progress in these areas - what have we learned? and how might the vision be revised? This session brings together panelists representing commercialization, emerging technologies, medical applications, and broader questions facing the domain of wearable electronics to tackle some of these questions.