engineering

International Solid-State Circuits Conference

International Solid-State Circuits Conference is a engineering topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand International Solid-State Circuits Conference rather than just read about it. In short: International Solid-State Circuits Conference is a global forum for presentation of advances in solid-state circuits and Systems-on-a-Chip. The conference is held every year in February at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis in downtown San Francisco.

Key takeaways

International Solid-State Circuits Conference belongs to engineering; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect International Solid-State Circuits Conference to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of International Solid-State Circuits Conference from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

International Solid-State Circuits Conference is a global forum for presentation of advances in solid-state circuits and Systems-on-a-Chip. The conference is held every year in February at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis in downtown San Francisco. ISSCC is sponsored by IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society. According to The Register, "The ISSCC event is the second event of each new year, following the Consumer Electronics Show, where new PC processors and sundry other computing gadgets are brought to market."

History of ISSCC

Early participants in the inaugural conference in 1954 belonged to the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) Circuit Theory Group and the IRE subcommittee of Transistor Circuits. The conference was held in Philadelphia and local chapters of IRE and American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) were in attendance. Later on AIEE and IRE would merge to become the present-day IEEE. The first conference consisted of papers from six organizations: Bell Telephone Laboratories, General Electric, RCA, Philco, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania. The registration was $4 (early registration was $3) and 601 people registered. International attendees arrived from Canada, England and Japan. With subsequent conferences came many more international participants with the first international presentation in 1958. By 1965, the number of overseas program committee members increased to 8 and in 1970 the overseas members began meeting separately in both Europe and Japan. Selected members of these regional program committees would attend the final program meeting in America. The name of the 1954 Conference appears in various publications and documents as: "The Transistor Conference", "The Conference on Transistor Circuits", "The Philadelphia Conference", or "The National Conference on Transistor Circuits". The current name "International Solid-State Circuits Conference" was settled by the organizers in 1960. While ISSCC was founded in Philadelphia, in the mid-1960s the center of semiconductor development in the United States was shifting west. In 1978, the conference was held on alternate coasts with New York soon substituting for Philadelphia. In 1990, San Francisco became the Conference's permanent home. In 2013, ISSCC celebrated its 60th anniversary and will had several special programs to celebrate 60 years of circuit and SoC innovation.

Technical Program Committee The Technical Program Committee (TPC) in early years was extremely fluid in order to deal with the constantly changing topics in the industry. By 1968 the list of subcommittees had settled to Digital, Analog (Linear), Microwave and Other, where the subcommittee members in Other would address the one-of-a-kind papers. In the 80's, the Microwave Subcommittee was dropped from the program as the overlap between the topics and attendees was diminishing. In addition, Digital split into Digital, Memory and Signal Processing subcommittees. In 1992, Emerging Technologies was launched and chartered to seek out the one-of-a-kind applications which may find a home in ISSCC. Today there are 10 subcommittees: Analog, Data Converters, Energy Efficient Digital (EED), High-Performance Digital (HPD), Imagers, MEMs, Medical and Displays (IMMD), Memory, RF, Technology Directions (formerly Emerging Technologies), Wireless and Wireline.

TPC chairs

European Committee Chairs

Far East Committee Chairs

Executive committee ISSCC is a strictly non-profit organization run by the executive committee. From formative years through 1980 the Conference chair was usually filled by the previous year's Program Chair. To provide needed continuity, the term of Conference Chair was extended to at least 5 years.

Conference Chairs

See also Custom Integrated Circuits Conference Hot Chips International Electron Devices Meeting Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits

References

W. David Pricer, "ISSCC: Sixty Years of Innovative Evolution", 2013 Commemorative Supplement to the Digest of Technical Papers, ISSCC 2013 (to be published)

External links Official website

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with International Solid-State Circuits Conference

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what International Solid-State Circuits Conference claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In engineering, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to International Solid-State Circuits Conference before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about International Solid-State Circuits Conference ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of International Solid-State Circuits Conference

In research: International Solid-State Circuits Conference appears in engineering research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses International Solid-State Circuits Conference in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: International Solid-State Circuits Conference is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Computer science conferences, IEEE conferences, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for International Solid-State Circuits Conference outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study International Solid-State Circuits Conference in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what International Solid-State Circuits Conference means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain International Solid-State Circuits Conference out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is International Solid-State Circuits Conference in simple terms?

Why does International Solid-State Circuits Conference matter?

Because it connects several engineering ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study International Solid-State Circuits Conference?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on International Solid-State Circuits Conference.