======================================================================== SIGDA -- The Resource for EDA Professionals www.sigda.org ======================================================================== 15 April 2003 ACM/SIGDA E-NEWSLETTER Vol. 33, No. 8 ======================================================================== (This ACM/SIGDA E-NEWSLETTER is being sent to all persons on the ACM/SIGDA mailing list. To request removal from the list, please email "pmadden@cs.binghamton.edu".) ======================================================================== Contents of this E-NEWSLETTER: (1) Current DA TechNews issue Tuesday 15 April 2003 From: "Diana Marculescu" (2) Upcoming Conferences and Symposia Tuesday 15 April 2003 From: "Igor Markov" (3) Upcoming Funding Opportunities Tuesday 15 April 2003 From: "Iris Bahar" ======================================================================== Dear ACM/SIGDA members, You can find the content of the current issue of SIGDA TechNews at http://www.acm.org/da_technews/current/homepage.html As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions. If you would like to participate or contribute to the content of the E-Newsletter, please feel free to contact any of us. Diana Marculescu, SIGDA E-Newsletter Editor Larry Pileggi, SIGDA E-Newsletter TechNews Associate Editor R. Iris Bahar, SIGDA E-Newsletter Associate Editor Igor Markov, SIGDA E-Newsletter Associate Editor Hiroto Yasuura, SIGDA E-Newsletter Associate Editor, Asian Activities DA TechNews headlines: "High-K Insulators Line Up at the Gate" Research groups in the chip industry are scouring for high-k dielectric materials for future gate insulators. This challenge is proving to be even more difficult than the integration of copper or low-k dielectrics in the interconnect stack, and some ... http://www.acm.org/da_technews/articles/2003-1/0410t.html#item1 "Shedding Light on Optical Processors" The technology world has long expected communications and computing technology to converge, but one stumbling block to this convergence is the fact that communications technology increasingly relies on fiber-optic techniques while computing ... http://www.acm.org/da_technews/articles/2003-1/0410t.html#item2 "Chip Designers Debate Asynchronous Resets" Asynchronous and synchronous resets both present challenges and benefits to chip design, according to discussions in the recent E-Mail Synopsys Users Group (ESNUG) 409 bulletin. A single inquiry elicited more than 20 responses arguing for and against ... http://www.acm.org/da_technews/articles/2003-1/0410t.html#item3 "Intel Settles Chip-Set Battles" Via Technologies and Intel have agreed to cancel all lawsuits and patent infringement claims against one another, and instead signed new licensing and patent-sharing deals. Via jumped on a market opportunity in 1999 as an Intel effort to switch to new ... http://www.acm.org/da_technews/articles/2003-1/0410t.html#item4 "Xerox: Let Everyone Have Fiber" Xerox scientists at the firm's Wilson Center for Research and Technology say they have developed a fingertip-size chip that could make it easier and cheaper to connect homes and businesses to underground fiber cables. The chip contains switches and ... http://www.acm.org/da_technews/articles/2003-1/0410t.html#item5 "Design Handles Iffy Nanocircuits" Netherlands-based researchers have simulated a chip architecture that can tolerate large numbers of defects. Delft University of Technology researchers Jie Han and Pieter Jonker used reconfigurability together with logic redundancy to minimize and ... http://www.acm.org/da_technews/articles/2003-1/0410t.html#item6 "Nanowire Circuits Could Spur Computing Advances" Harvard University chemistry professor Charles Lieber says he has developed semiconducting wires only a few nanometers wide that perform better in transistors compared to standard silicon integrated circuits. The nanowires are made from crystals from ... http://www.acm.org/da_technews/articles/2003-1/0410t.html#item7 "Chip Intricacies Give Giant a Leg Up" The increasingly high cost of semiconductor design is likely to enable Intel to move ahead of its competitors and further entrench its dominant position in the market, writes Duncan Stewart. As semiconductor design has moved from the early days ... http://www.acm.org/da_technews/articles/2003-1/0410t.html#item8 "Motorola Reveals Nanocrystal Chip" Motorola is experimenting with flash-memory chips that have transistor gates wrapped in a nanocrystal layer rather than silicon dioxide. Wrapping the microscopic on/off switches inside flash-memory chips in a thinner layer should enable ... http://www.acm.org/da_technews/articles/2003-1/0410t.html#item9 "ASICs Versus FPGAs" Three different players in the industry--Bob Payne of Philips Semiconductors, Jackson Krieter of Hier Design, and Brett Cline of Forte Design Systems--offered three different perspectives on the ASIC-versus-FPGA debate. The pro-ASIC position is staked out ... http://www.acm.org/da_technews/articles/2003-1/0410t.html#item10 "Eclipse.org Introduces More Open Source Tools" Eclipse.org has released CDT 1.0, a set of open-source development tools that will contribute to the overall goal of a Web-enabled open-source development environment for connected devices and systems. IBM Software Group director of product ... http://www.acm.org/da_technews/articles/2003-1/0410t.html#item11 "System Partitioning and Verification" Software-compiled system design tremendously boosts designers productivity while maintaining high levels of quality, according to Celoxica and Xilinx, which together demonstrated the co-design methodology. The group finished a Celoxica JPEG2000 ... http://www.acm.org/da_technews/articles/2003-1/0410t.html#item12 "Ferroelectric Limit" Scientists have conducted computer simulations to find out whether high-dielectric-constant ferroelectric thin films will retain the same qualities at the nanometer level. Ferroelectric thin films would allow memory chip designers to pack capacitors ... http://www.acm.org/da_technews/articles/2003-1/0410t.html#item13 "Simplifying Adaptive Filter Design in Echo Cancellers" Representatives of Octasic Inc. describe a new adaptive filter (AF) scheme designed to take the "black magic" out of echo cancellation and thus make it an easier task for design engineers putting together derived voice applications such as VoP and VoIP. ... http://www.acm.org/da_technews/articles/2003-1/0410t.html#item14 "Momentum Builds for Multiple-Gate Transistors" FinFETs, the fin-shaped multiple-gate transistors that are designed to waste much less power and put out much less heat than planar transistors, have become the subject of intense development by organizations including Advanced Micro Devices, ... http://www.acm.org/da_technews/articles/2003-1/0410t.html#item15 "Standards Body Begins to Advance DDR2 SDRAM" Although DDR2 SDRAM chips and modules have only recently been introduced to suppliers, some groups are starting to define future versions of the memory technology. For example, the JEDEC Solid State Technology Association recently endorsed a Click Here to View Full Article ... http://www.acm.org/da_technews/articles/2003-1/0410t.html#item16 "Selecting Passive Components for PLLs" The purpose of a phase-lock loop (PLL) in certain types of circuits, such as SERDES circuits, is to match the frequency output of a voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) against a clock reference. When a PLL requires external components such as ... http://www.acm.org/da_technews/articles/2003-1/0410t.html#item17 "The Impact of Photovoltaic Technology on Sensor Design" The seemingly obvious benefits of switching from wired to wireless sensors--which would eliminate the need for installing and maintaining complex systems of cabling and wiring--have long been trumped by the difficulty of providing a reliable power ... http://www.acm.org/da_technews/articles/2003-1/0410t.html#item18 "Cost-Savvy DSP Chip Trio Keeps Performance High" The growing number of functions on handheld consumer electronics, such as video, still images, music, and other media available on cell phones, PDAs, and tablet PCs, is forcing designers to find ways to meet the processing requirements while still meeting ... http://www.acm.org/da_technews/articles/2003-1/0410t.html#item19 "Will Parallel Chips Pay Off?" Manufacturing ability is outstripping that of design and verification, so that semiconductor firms are trying to find uses for the millions of transistors they can build on a chip. A number of small British and U.S. firms are hoping to find the ... http://www.acm.org/da_technews/articles/2003-1/0410t.html#item20 "In Search of ASIC Alternatives" Chipmakers ranging from AMI Semiconductor and Chip Express to the big ASIC companies LSI Logic and NEC Corp. are beginning to offer hybrid FPGA/ASIC designs that take some advantage of ASIC's efficiency while coming in at a price tag lower than a pure ASIC ... http://www.acm.org/da_technews/articles/2003-1/0410t.html#item21 "Mobile Marvel" A new chip developed at the University of California, Berkeley, promises to deliver desktop gaming capabilities to handheld devices. The Vector Intelligent Random Access Memory chip has short-term memory on the same chip as the processor instead of on ... http://www.acm.org/da_technews/articles/2003-1/0410t.html#item22 "Making a Better Copper Barrier" Although advanced physical vapor deposition (PVD) techniques for creating copper metal barriers have been extended far beyond what people once expected--it is workable at the 90 nm node and many believe it can be extended through the 65 nm node--sputtered ... http://www.acm.org/da_technews/articles/2003-1/0410t.html#item23 "Spreading Out" General-purpose DSP revenue will reach $5.8 billion this year and close to $15 billion in 2007, but in order to build their revenue up that high, DSP vendors will need to continue moving beyond communications and multimedia into new markets such as security ... http://www.acm.org/da_technews/articles/2003-1/0410t.html#item24 "Getting Warmer" Scientists are finding new semiconducting materials and structures that could one day be used for spintronic devices. Magnetic random-access memory (MRAM) and computer disk read heads have already been created using spintronics, which ... http://www.acm.org/da_technews/articles/2003-1/0410t.html#item25 ======================================================================== Submission deadlines: --------------------- MAPLD 2003 - Intl. Conf. on Military Applications of Programmable Logic Devices Washington, D.C. Deadline: April 25, 2003 Conference Dates: September 9-11, 2003 BMC 2003 -- Intl. Workshop on Bounded Model Checking Boulder, Colorado, USA Deadline: April 27, 2003 Workshop Dates: July 13, 2003 http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~bmc03/ ICCD 2003 - International Conference on Computer Design San Jose, California Deadline: May 2, 2003 Conference dates: October 13-15, 2003 http://www.iccd-conference.org/ SoC 2003 - Intl. Symp. on System-on-Chip 2003 Tampere, Finland Deadline: May 30, 2003 Symposium Dates: November 19-21, 2003. http://www.cs.tut.fi/soc/soc2003.html Upcoming symposia, conferences and workshops: --------------------------------------------- Cool Chips VI April 16-18, 2003 Yokohama, Japan Jan 27, 2003 http://www.coolchips.org/ RAW 2003 Reconfigurable Architectures Workshop Nice, France April 22, 2003 http://www.ece.lsu.edu/vaidy/raw03/ HiCOMB 2003 -- Intl. Workshop on High Performance Computational Biology Nice, France Tuesday, April 22, 2003 http://hpc.eece.unm.edu/HiCOMB/ VLSI-TSA 2003 -- Intl. Symp. on VLSI Technology, Systems, and Applications Hsinchu, Taiwan April 23-25, 2003 http://vlsitsa.itri.org.tw/default.asp VTS 2003 -- IEEE VLSI Test Symposium Napa, CA Apr 27-May 1, 2003 http://www.tttc-vts.org/ GLSVLSI 2003 -- Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI Washington D.C. April 28-29, 2003 http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigda/glsvlsi/ Semiconductor Microstructures and Atom Traps - Bose Condensation in Atomic and Solid State Systems London, UK Workshop date: May 1, 2003 http://physics.iop.org/IOP/Confs/SMA/ SAT 2003 - Intl. Conf. on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing S. Margherita Ligure - Portofino (Italy) May 5-8, 2003 http://www.mrg.dist.unige.it/events/sat03/ ISCAS 2003 - Intl. Symp. on Circuits and Systems Bangkok, Thailand May 25-28, 2003 http://www.iscas2003.org/ IWLS 2003 - Intl. Workshop on Logic and Synthesis Laguna Beach, California May 28-30, 2003 http://www.iwls.org/ DAC 2003 - Design Automation Conference Anaheim, California June 2-6, 2003 http://www.dac.com/ 2003 ACM Federated Computing Research Conference INCLUDES: ISCA (architecture), PLDI (languages), SAS (static analysis), SCG (computational geometry), STOC (theory), SPAA (parallel algorithms and architectures), SOFTVIS (visualization), LCTES (tools for embedded systems) San Diego, California June 7-14, 2003 http://www.acm.org/sigs/conferences/fcrc/ ======================================================================== Upcoming Funding Opportunities ------------------------------ NSF PROGRAMS Advanced Computational Research http://www.cise.nsf.gov/div/ccr/fndg/display.cfm?pgm_pims_id=5313&pgm_supp_id=10094&loc=ccr&pub_id=5527 July 01, 2003 High Performance Network Connections http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2003/nsf03529/nsf03529.htm Deadline: April 21, 2003 Ultra-High-Capacity Optical Communications http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2003/nsf03537/nsf03537.htm Letter of Intent: March 31, 2003 Deadline: May 6, 2003 Evaluative Research and Evaluation Capacity Building (EREC) and Research on Learning and Education (ROLE) (EREC/ROLE) http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2003/nsf03542/nsf03542.htm Deadline: May 15, 2003 National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NNIN) http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2003/nsf03519/nsf03519.html Letter of Intent due (optional): April 7, 2003 Full Proposals: May 16, 2003 Robert Noyce Scholarship Program http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2003/nsf03544/nsf03544.htm Deadline: May 16, 2003 SRC programs Robert M. Burger Fellowship Competition http://www.src.org/member/news/burger_news.asp Deadline: April 30, 2003 ========================================================================