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Post ISSCC17

Posted on 2 mins read

This last week was my second time at a conference, and it was the same one as last year International Solid State Circuits Conference. When I attended last year, all I really remember was being utterly overwhelmed by everything that was going on. I tried to go to as many sessions as possible, trying to get a sense for what everyone was doing in their research. Instead, I only learned that I understood absolutely nothing about circuit design or what I wanted to do.

Going back a year later, with a year of research, a tape-out, and a publication under my belt, it was a different story. I basically just ignored half the sessions because I thought they were pretty boring (wireless power, memory, processors) and could reasonably follow along with the ones I was interested in (PLLs, ADCs, deep-learning). Rather than do a huge summary of everything, I'll just make this short list of my favorite papers, and possible come back and expand it later:

  • 4.4: A Sub-nW 80mlx to 1.27mlx Self-Referencing Light-To-Digital Converter with AlGaAs Photodiode
  • 5.4: Frequency-Locked-Loop Ring Oscillator with 3ns Peak-to-Peak Accumulated Jitter in 1ms Time Window for High-Resolution Frequency Counting
  • 8.1: Improved Power-Side-Channel-Attack Resistance of an AES-128 Core via a Security-Aware Integrated Buck Voltage Regulator
  • 8.2: 8Mb/s 28Mb/mJ Robust True-Random-Number Generator in 65nm CMOS Based on Differential Ring Oscillator with Feedback Resistors
  • 18.3: A Single-Port Duplex RF Front-End for X-Band Single Antenna FMCW Radar in 65nm CMOS
  • 21.6: A 12nW Always-On Acoustic Sensing and Object Recognition Microsystem Using Frequency-Domain Feature Extraction and SVM Classification
  • 21.8: An Actively Detuned Wireless Power Receiver with Public Key Cryptographic Authentication and Dynamic Power Allocation
  • 22.6: A Fully Integrated Counter-Flow Energy Reservoir for 70%-Efficient Peak-Power Delivery in Ultra-Low Power Systems
  • 22.7: An Inductively-Coupled Wireless Power-Transfer System that is Immune to Distance and Load Variations*
  • 24.5: A 4.5nW Wake-Up Radio with -69dBm Sensitivity
  • 24.7: A 673μW 1.8-to-2.5GHz Dividerless Fractional-N Digital PLL with an Inherent Frequency-Capture Capability and a Phase-Dithering Spur Mitigation for IoT Applications

* Not going to comment much however this is an awful title. Wireless power immune to distance variations, yeah ok.