UM excels once more at ‘World Chip Olympics’

The University of Macau (UM) and its State Key Laboratory of Analog and Mixed-Signal VLSI (AMSV) are pleased to announce that three papers and three (PhD) Student Research Previews were accepted and presented at the 63rd ISSCC that took place, as always, in San Francisco, California. This was again an excellent harvest for AMSV the leading laboratory in the field of Electronics in the Greater China region.

The IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society is the world’s most authoritative forum in the field of IC (Integrated Circuits) design, and their IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) is considered the ‘Chip Olympics’ of IC academia and industry. This year the conference’s theme was: Silicon Systems for the Internet of Everything.

Prof Pui-In Mak (Elvis), Dr Jun Yin (Kevin) and PhD student Ka-Meng Lei, presented their papers, entitled ‘A 0.038mm2 Saw-less Multiband Transceiver using an N-Path SC Gain Loop’, ‘A 0.003mm2 1.7-to-3.5GHz Dual-Mode Time-Interleaved Ring-VCO achieving 90-to150kHz 1/f3 Phase-Noise Corner’ and ‘A Handheld 50-pM Sensitivity Micro-NMR CMOS Platform with B-Field Stabilization for Multi-Type Biological/Chemical Assays’, respectively. This last paper was also selected for a Demonstration Session and received the Silk Road Award for the best PhD student paper from the Far-East.

PhD Students Liang Qi, Chio-In Ieong (Tom) and Wei-Han Yu (Hank) presented their communications and posters at the Student Research Preview, entitled ‘A 12.5-ENOB 5MHz BW 4.2mW DT Multirate 2-1 Mash ΔΣ Modulator with Horizontal/Vertical Opamp Sharing in 65nm CMOS’, ‘A 0.45V 147-to-375nW Hardware-Efficient Real-Time ECG Processor with Lossless-to-Lossy Data Compression for Wireless Healthcare Wearables’ and ‘A 2.4-GHz Digitally-Modulated Class-D Polar Pa Using Power-Gating, Interactive Am-Am Modulation and a Dynamic Matching Network for Battery Lifetime Extension’, respectively. The last 2 research previews received Student Travel Grant Awards.

Finally, Prof Seng-Pan U, Deputy Director of AMSV, received also at the conference his IEEE Fellow certificate attributed in 2016 by the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society.

When compared to world-top level universities and companies, the above results are really outstanding and unique by any standards in the state-of-the-art area of Electronics, the leading discipline of the 4th Industrial Revolution also known as Industry 4.0.