TCVLSI newsletter

Excited to publish and share with the VLSI global community our TCVLSI Volume 7 Issue 1 newsletter, the first in my role as the IEEE-CS TCVLSI Chair. The Feb 2021 TCVLSI newsletter features an invited article by Dr. Victor Zhirnov from SRC (Semiconductor Research Corporation) where he shares SRC’s perspective on the “Decadal Plan for Semiconductors: What We Need for 2030 and Beyond”. Identifying five seismic shifts, the Decadal Plan provides an executive overview of global drivers and constraints for the future semiconductor and Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) industry, rather than offering specific solutions.

The newsletter also features a personal perspective by an industry leader. “A Retrospective: If Anything in This Life Is Certain, It’s That You Can Kill any ISA” by Dr. Shubu Mukherjee, VP of Architecture at SiFive, where having worked on many different architectures throughout his career, he offers his take on existing Instruction Set Architectures (ISAs) that straddle our current and future VLSI designs.

The newsletter spotlights one of TCVLSI’s flagship conferences in 2020, the IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI also known as ISVLSI. One-page teasers of two best papers awarded at ISVLSI 2020 are showcased: “Near-chip Dynamic Vision Filtering for Low-Bandwidth Pedestrian Detection” and “Enabling Optimal On-Chip Power Generation of Flow Cell Arrays in 3D MPSoCs with On-Chip Switched Capacitor Converters".

While in terms of numbers we are just beginning to make a dent in our collective efforts to promote gender balance and diversity in the field of VLSI, the truth remains that we do have some very powerful role-model female innovators in academia and industry who are pushing the engineering envelope forward in the field of VLSI. In a first, introducing our Women in VLSI (WiV) segment, our TCVLSI newsletter shares an inspiring interview with Prof. Valencia Joyner Koomson, an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Tufts University, MA, USA. Click here for the newsletter.

I’d love to hear from the readers on what you would like to see in the subsequent newsletters. Feel free to provide any feedback/recommendations via email to me. Happy reading.

Mondira (Mandy) Pant, Ph.D

Chair, IEEE Computer Society TCVLSI

Editor-in-Chief of IEEE VCASL, TCVLSI

Intel Corporation, USA

IEEE CS-TCVLSI

Email: mondira.pant@ieee.org