REPORT
Ninth Annual IEEE ASIC Conference
1996

by
S. Ciccarelli & P.R. Mukund

The ninth annual IEEE International Application Specific Integrated Circuits Conference, sponsored by the IEEE Rochester Section, in cooperation with the IEEE Solid State Circuits Council, was held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Rochester, NY, September 23-27, 1996. The conference featured a three day technical program followed by two days of tutorial workshops. All of the events were held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel.

The conference opened with a Keynote Session on Monday morning. The keynote speaker was Walter Davis, Senior Vice President and Director of Strategic Semiconductor Operations for the Messaging Systems Products Group, Motorola, Inc. The topic of this session was "The Role of VLSI in Wireless Communication." The focus of his talk was trends in portable products and power driven design verses performance driven design.

Immediately following the Keynote Session was the Vendor Presentation Session. At this session, three vendors each gave a twenty minute presentation to the conference attendees. These vendors were: IBM, Synopsis , and Harris RF Communications. These vendors also sponsored breaks throughout the conference during the various technical sessions.

The technical program was held on Monday afternoon through Wednesday afternoon, with the tutorial workshops being held on Thursday and Friday. The technical program consisted of 59 regular papers presented in 10 sessions, with two parallel tracks. Most sessions opened with an invited paper for a total of 69 papers. The total number of papers submitted was 108. The acceptance rate was approximately 50%, which is significantly down from last year. The tutorial workshops were presented in two parallel tracks. The topics were: "VHDL Synthesis Packages", "RF Design", "Design and Implementation of Digital Wireless Communication Systems", "Algorithms for Wireless Communications", "DSP Architecture", and "Low Power Design".

On Tuesday, Dr. Charles (Bob) Hewes from Texas Instruments presented a talk at the conference luncheon titled "The Convergence of DSP and ASIC." This talk focused on mobility and communications as a driver for DSP and ASICs. The conference banquet was held on Tuesday evening. The banquet speaker was Irwin Federman, Senior Partner, US Venture Partners. The title of his talk was "Venture Capital Perspectives on the Information Technology Revolution." He presented his view of ASIC development, past, present, and future. He specifically mentioned that process technology improvements will not be the differentiating feature between ASIC companies in the future as it has been. He also believes that the semiconductor industry will be a growth business for "the rest of our natural lives."

The conference proceedings were published by IEEE Publishing Services. The number of pages was 326. The total number of copies printed was 520..

The attendance at ASIC'96 was about 75% of last year's attendance. The total number of registrations was 198. There were 137 attendees from the US, 26 from Asia, 21 from Europe, and 14 from Canada.

The organizing committee and technical committee are to be congratulated for their efforts in putting together the program and the conference.