Connectivity And Multimedia—Two Key Themes For the 2006 ISSCC

Jan. 19, 2006

With today's emphasis on mobile communications and entertainment, it's no surprise that next month's IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Franscisco (Feb. 5-9) will focus on wireless connectivity, portability, and multimedia. Researchers will detail trends and developments in low-power design, communications, and multimedia technologies in more than 250 papers.

Three plenary presentations will open the conference. Tze-Chiang Chen, VP of Science and Technology and a fellow at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center, will examine "Where CMOS is Going." Hermann Eul, a member of the management board at Infineon Technologies, will cover "Developments in ICs for Mobile Multimedia Communications." Ken Kutaragi, president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, will address "The Future of Computing for Real-Time Entertainment."

Sessions 6, 10, 11, 14, 17, 20, 26, and 31 will tackle wireless topics. These include Ultra-Wideband communications, highly integrated GSM/GPRS and PHS cell-phone chips, single-chip 802.11a/b/g devices with an RF front end, base-band analog and media-access controllers on a single chip, and ZigBee solutions that combine the radio and physical layers on one chip.

Session 33 will look at mobile TV applications, with several presentations detailing receiver chips for digital video broadcast-handheld systems and tuner chips for the terrestrial digital multimedia/digital audio broadcasting systems. Low-power multimedia solutions will take center stage in Session 22, while image sensors for cameras and camera phones will be the subject of Session 27. Also, Session 29 will cover power-management approaches, and Session 9 will offer display developments.

Many other topics will be on the schedule. Sessions 15, 17, and 23 will focus on technology directions. These papers will discuss an electronic "nose," RF ID tags, 1-Tbit/s inductively coupled data transfers between 3D integrated chips, 1-µW power generation based on 1 milliCurie of benign nickel-63 as a radiation source, and much more. Additional sessions will cover developments in microprocessors, memories, data converters, and analog circuit techniques.

ISSCC
www.isscc.org/isscc

See the Figure

About the Author

Dave Bursky | Technologist

Dave Bursky, the founder of New Ideas in Communications, a publication website featuring the blog column Chipnastics – the Art and Science of Chip Design. He is also president of PRN Engineering, a technical writing and market consulting company. Prior to these organizations, he spent about a dozen years as a contributing editor to Chip Design magazine. Concurrent with Chip Design, he was also the technical editorial manager at Maxim Integrated Products, and prior to Maxim, Dave spent over 35 years working as an engineer for the U.S. Army Electronics Command and an editor with Electronic Design Magazine.