CICC'07

The 2007 IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC) will take place on September 16-19, 2007, at the DoubleTree Hotel in San Jose, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley.

CICC is one of the top conferences on circuit design. The main topics of the conference are Analog Circuit Design, Digital Circuit amd SoC/ASIP/SiP Design and Methodology, Custom Applications and Power Management, Sensors, MEMs, Manufacturing and Test, Wireless Designs, Wireless Communications, Programmable Devices, Embedded Memory, Signal and Data Processing and Simulation and Modeling, including Compact Device Modeling.

CICC 2007 will intend to show the latest developments in Compact Modeling, for the training of designers and to facilitate a close interaction between designers and compact model developers.

I will present an invited paper at CICC 2007, which will present charge based modeling techniques for multiple-gate MOSFETs.

Not all is business in San Jose. It is a wonderful city with many other attractions: golf courses, wineries, and for hikers and nature lovers, the Alum Rock Park. Besides, San Jose, which is called the "Safest Big City in America", has an intense nightlife, with many dance clubs and sports bars.

ICMTS'08

The 21st IEEE International Conference on Microelectronic Test Structures (ICMTS) will be held in Edinburgh, Scotland, March 24-27 2008.

ICMTS has become a well established conference addressing topics such as test structures, material, process and device characterization techniques, compact device model parameter extraction and reliability analysis.

In 2008 ICMTS will be organized by the University of Edinburgh. Extended abstracts should be submitted by September 14 2007.

From my experience, ICMTS is a very interesting forum to present new methods to extract parameters of compact device models. In the recent times there has been emphasis on parameter extraction from RF measurements. Also ICMTS allows a very useful interaction between researchers coming from characterization teams and compact modeling teams. On the other hand, I want to highlight that ICMTS uses to have a very nice social programme.

ICOE'07

The third edition of the International Conference on Organic Electronics (ICOE) was held at the High-Tech Campus in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, June 04-07 2007

ICOE arised as an initiative of the European Framework 6 IST Programme through the Integrated Project 'PolyApply'. This conference addresses all issues related to organic electronics, such as materials, manufacture, Organic Thin Film Transistors (OTFTs), OLEDs, PV devices, organic circuit design, and organic device modeling.

Many interesting papers were presented, mostly from Europe. It should be mentioned that there are many European teams currently working on organic electronics.

There were not many paper dealing with device modeling, although there were interesting. We can highlit the papers entitled "Modeling Traps in ultrathin pentacene transistors," by A. D. Geiser, A. von Mühlenen, N. Errien and L. Zuppiroli (EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland), "Paper Charge Injection Model for Organic Light-emitting Diodes," by L. Li, G. Meller, and H. Kosina (Institute for Microelectronics, TU-Wien, Wien, Austria).

One paper presented a compact model for OTFTs, assuming a transport mechanism based on a quasi-drift-quasi-diffusion theory.. It was entitled "Analytical modelling of TFTs and diodes on small molecule organic semiconductor devices," by S. Prior, D.Donaghy, W.Eccleston (Organic Electronics Group, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK), and B. Stablober and A. Haase (Joanneum Research, Austria).

The invited speakers were also top scientists in Organic Electronics. Sergei Baranovski (Philipps-University Marburg, Germany) presented a theory of the charge transport in disordered organic materials. Dan Frisbie (University of Minnesota, USA) made a talk about the Polymer Electrolyte-Gated Organic Field-Effect Transistors. Hagen Klauk (Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, Stuttgart, Germany) made a very interesting presentation about low voltage organic transistors and circuits. Takao Someya (University of Tokyo, Japan) addressed the printed organic transistors for large-area skin-like sensors and actuators.

Despite PolyApply will end at the end of 2007, it is expected that ICOE will still be held new year, supported by other sponsors.

MOS-AK at ESSDERC/ESSCIRC'07

MOS-AK Workshop on compact modeling will be held on Friday, 14 September 2007 in Munich, and it is organized for fifth subsequent time as an integral part of the ESSDERC/ESSCIRC conference, aims to strengthen a network and discussion forum among experts in the field, create an open platform for information exchange related to compact/Spice modeling, bring people in the compact modeling field together, as well as obtain feedback from technology developers, circuit designers, and CAD tool vendors.

The topics cover all important aspects of compact model development, implementation, deployment and standardization within the main theme - compact models for mainstream CMOS/SOI circuit simulation. The specific workshop goal will be to classify the most important directions for the future development of the compact models and to clearly identify areas that need further research.

This workshop is designed for device process engineers (CMOS, SOI, BiCMOS, SiGe) who are interested in device modeling; ICs designers (RF/IF/Analog/Mixed-Signal/SoC) and those starting in that area as well as device characterization, modeling and parameter extraction engineers. The content will be beneficial for anyone who needs to learn what is really behind IC simulation in modern device models. The technical program of MOS-AK Workshop consists of one day of tutorials given by noted academic and industry experts, also a posters session is foreseen.

More information on http://www.mos-ak.org/munich/

CMOS at 60GHz

It is not Compact Modelling, but it is interesting enough. It seems that toshiba has developed a CMOS (yes, CMOS) technology able to run at 60GHz... See yourself the press release here.