We are heading to an exciting world where the boundaries between the physical world and the digital/virtual world are blurring, and opportunities and possibilities that are unseeable today will be unleashed. This fascinating future world requires drastic technological breakthroughs and innovations. One key requirement is immersive connectivity and sensing with everything. In this talk, I will present our group research activities in integrated circuits and systems advancing this mission in three key pillars: wireline communication/interconnect, sensing, and wireless communication and radar.

Dr. Qun Jane Gu received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2007. After a couple of years of industry experience, she started her academic career in 2010 at the University of Florida. Since 2012, she has been with the University of California, Davis, where she is currently a professor. Dr. Jane Gu’s group is passionate in high performance RF, mm-wave and THz integrated circuits and systems and its broad applications. The works from her group have won nine best paper awards from international conferences, including four times from IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Symposium (IMS). She has received 2013 NSF CAREER award, 2015 UC Davis Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, 2017 and 2018 Qualcomm Faculty Award, 2019 UC Davis Chancellor Fellow, and 2022-23 Solid-State Circuits Society Distinguished Lecturer. She is a TPC member of solid state conferences RFIC, CICC and ISSCC.

Important: The participation is free of charge, but registration is required

For more details and updates on the series of “ACRC Semiconductor Webinars” please follow our newsletters and our website 

A graph is a ubiquitous data structure that models entities and their interactions through the collections of nodes and edges. It is widely employed in several important application domains ranging from social media, navigation tools, search engines, physics simulations, and biology. Despite its prevalence, the performance of graph workloads on commercial platforms is limited. This is mainly due to the irregular nature of memory accesses and convoluted control flow instructions used in graph applications while accessing large amounts of real-world graph data (i.e., billions of nodes/edges). Therefore, there is a pressing need for optimizing the performance of graph workloads.

In this talk, I will present a systematic optimization study of graph workloads running on both static and dynamic graphs. Specifically, I will present two of my most recent works called NDMiner [ISCA 2022] and Mint [MICRO 2022] in detail. NDMiner optimizes the execution of the Graph Pattern Mining (GPM) application. In this work, I will showcase how to combine the benefits of Near Data Processing (NDP) and domain specialization to improve GPM workload performance. Mint, on the other hand, investigates and optimizes a pattern mining application on temporal graphs (a type of dynamic graph), called temporal motif mining. Mint presents a new programming model, hardware accelerator architecture, and domain-specific optimization to significantly improve the performance of mining temporal motifs. In addition to these works, I will briefly tough upon our optimization and detailed benchmarking effort for traditional graph processing algorithms (e.g., PageRank and SSSP) and random walk-based graph learning pipelines (e.g., node classification and link prediction).

Nishil Talati recently completed his PhD from University of Michigan, USA. Prior to joining the PhD program, he completed a master’s degree with thesis from Technion, Israel, and an undergraduate degree from BITS Pilani, India. Nishil’s research interests span computer architecture, compilers, and software engineering. Specifically, he has worked on several optimization efforts to improve the memory performance of modern computing systems. One of his recent works was recognized as the best paper award at HPCA 2021.

Important: The participation is free of charge, but registration is required

For more details and updates on the series of “ACRC Semiconductor Webinars” please follow our newsletters and our website 

I will discuss the challenge of using CMOS chips in optical communication applications in this talk. Optical communication has many advantages compared to copper and wireless systems. However, the optical-electrical conversion in the receiver typically requires an external photodiode adding volume and cost to the system. I will explain how it is possible to realize fully integrated optical receivers in CMOS using a pn-photodiode or a Schottky photodiode. While the former is only sensitive to 850 nm light, the latter is sensitive to the more abundant 1310 nm and 1550 nm wavelengths. Due to the intrinsically low response of these integrated photodiodes, low-noise readout circuits are required, which I will also discuss.

Filip Tavernier obtained the M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering and the Ph.D. degree in Engineering Science from KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, in 2005 and 2011, respectively. During 20112014, he was Senior Fellow in the microelectronics group at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. He was involved in chip designs for the upgrade program of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments. In 2014, he rejoined KU Leuven at the Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT-MICAS). As of October 2015, he has been a professor within the same department. His main research interests include circuits for optical communication, data converters, DC-DC converters, and chips for cryogenic environments. Filip is a member of the technical program committees of ESSCIRC, CICC, and SBCCI. He has been SSC-L Guest Editor and is the current SSCS Webinar Chair.

Important: The participation is free of charge, but registration is required

For more details and updates on the series of “ACRC Semiconductor Webinars” please follow our newsletters and our website 

Michael Kagan is NVIDIA CTO (Chief Technology Officer) since May 2020. He joined NVIDIA through Mellanox acquisition.

Michael Kagan was previously Mellanox CTO and a co-founder of Mellanox that was founded in April 1999.

From 1983 to April 1999, Mr. Kagan held a number of architecture and design positions at Intel Corporation. While at Intel Corporation, Mr. Kagan was architect of the i860XP vector processor, managed Pentium MMX design, and managed the architecture team of the Basic PC product group.

Mr. Kagan holds a BSc. in Electrical Engineering from the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology.

Important: registration is required

For more details and updates on the series of “ACRC Semiconductor Webinars” please follow our newsletters and our website 

Millimeter wave frequency operation offers wide bandwidths, precise localization, and rich material interaction and penetration capability.  Meeting consumer demand for enhanced safety, 77GHz automotive radar is one of the fastest growing features in automotive.  Leveraging the dense integration and fast transistor performance of modern silicon processes, emerging MMICs are delivering higher performance in a smaller form factor and are also extending the mm-wave capabilities to other sensing markets.  Radar’s next frontier is to improve angular resolution towards a true imaging radar that can complement or displace lidars in highly automated driving.  This talk will cover these application trends and how they are enabled by emerging radar ICs.

Brian Ginsburg received his S.B., M.Eng., and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.   He joined Texas Instruments, Dallas, Texas in 2007 working in its wireless business and TI’s Kilby Labs.  Now, he is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff and the systems manager of TI’s radar business.  He has served on the technical program committee for the International Solid-State Circuits Symposium and is Symposium Chair of the 2022 Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits.

Important: The participation is free of charge, but registration is required

For more details and updates on the series of “ACRC Semiconductor Webinars” please follow our newsletters and our website 

The low power IoT market began in earnest in 1999 with the launch of the first commercial Bluetooth^® device.  Analysis of >200 datasheets and published IEEE conference and journal papers shows that since then, active power consumption for these low data rate radios has reduced by 20x, while sensitivity has improved by 15dB.  Large power reductions have also been seen in metrics such as the standby and BLE-1s connection interval currents.  This talk will explore which innovations have made this possible, and what power consumption trends we can we expect in the future.   Questions to be addressed include:  How does power consumption trade off with data rate, transmit power and receiver sensitivity? How low power is low enough? Where do wakeup radios and energy harvesting fit into this?  Where will it all end?

Danielle Griffith received the B.S.E.E. and M.Eng. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.   In 2003, she joined Texas Instruments in Dallas, Texas and is a Fellow in the Connectivity business unit.  Her current focus areas are circuits and architectures for efficient wireless systems, low power oscillators and MEMS circuitry.   She has published a book chapter and >50 papers, most of them in IEEE journals or conferences.   Danielle holds 19 issued US patents and has given numerous university and IEEE conference tutorial and workshop sessions.  She has been a member of the Technical Program Committees for the IEEE RFIC Symposium (2014-2015), IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (2016-2019), and the IEEE VLSI Symposium (2019-2020).  She is a senior member of the IEEE, an associate editor of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits since 2020, and has been selected as Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society for 2021–2022.

Important: The participation is free of charge, but registration is required

For more details and updates on the series of “ACRC Semiconductor Webinars” please follow our newsletters and our website 

Microelectronic revolutions come in waves that are driven by necessity. Currently, the aging population is creating a need for various kinds of electronic systems to improve their quality of life. These include the restoration of lost functionality via electronic implants, better health screening technology and non-invasive monitoring in the home environment. This talk presents work that has been done towards addressing these needs, whether it be through the development of new required building blocks or through the development of more complex systems that combine custom built hardware and software. In particular the talk covers work done towards developing a vestibular implant for balance restoration, a single chip low-power imager for a bionic eye, a cancer screening capsule for detecting early-stage carcinomas in the small intestine, a bio-inspired acoustic scene analysis system, the development of the ElectroUteroGraph, as well as the use of custom chips for the design of adaptive metamaterials.

Julius Georgiou (IEEE M’98-SM’08) is an Associate Professor at the University of Cyprus. He received his M.Eng degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Ph.D. degree from Imperial College London in 1998 and 2003 respectively. For two years he worked as Head of Micropower Design in a technology start-up company, Toumaz Technology.  In 2004 he joined the Johns Hopkins University as a Postdoctoral Fellow, before becoming a faculty member at the University of Cyprus from 2005 to date. He is one of the co-founders of AJM Med-i-CAPs Ltd.

Prof. Georgiou is a member of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, is the Chair of the IEEE Biomedical and Life Science Circuits and Systems (BioCAS) Technical Committee, as well as a member of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Analog Signal Processing Technical Committee. He served as the General Chair of the 2010 IEEE Biomedical Circuits and Systems Conference and is the Action Chair of the EU COST Action ICT-1401 on “Memristors-Devices, Models, Circuits, Systems and Applications – MemoCIS”. Prof. Georgiou was an IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Distinguished Lecturer for 2016-2017. He also was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems, an Associate Editor of the Frontiers in Neuromorphic Engineering Journal and a Guest Editor for the IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems, for Programmable Metamaterials and also Circuits and Systems for Smart Agriculture. He is a recipient of a best paper award at the IEEE ISCAS 2011 International Symposium and at the IEEE BioDevices 2008 Conference. In 2016 he received ONE Award from the President of the Republic of Cyprus for his research accomplishments.