The IEEE ISSCC (International Solid-State Circuits Conference) will be held from February 8th to 12th in San Francisco. This Conference is an important indicator of the advanced trends in R&D as well as the mainstream developments of the semiconductor industry. The ISSCC 2009 held separate regional press conferences in Japan, Taiwan, Korea and Mainland China from November 25th to December 1st in 2008. The statistics indicate that National Taiwan University ranked No. 2 in global academia; in addition, starting from ISSCC 2005, for five consecutive years NTU has the greatest number of papers presented at ISSCC.

For ISSCC 2009, a total of 204 papers were selected for presentation, of which Taiwan has 18, occupying 9% of the total. Taiwan is the country from the Far East that has the greatest number of papers presented at ISSCC, second only to Japan.

As NTU has 10 papers selected for presentation at ISSCC 2009, it's evident that our outstanding performance is largely attributable to the joint efforts of our faculty and students, but the staunch support from the semi-conductor industry of Taiwan also plays a pivotal role. From ISSCC 2007 onwards, the NTU papers were mostly the research achievements of the "NTU/Mediatek Wireless Research Lab" and the "TSMC University Shuttle Program". Of the 10 papers selected for ISSCC 2009 from NTU, six came from the "NTU/Mediatek Wireless Research Lab," and four came from the TSMC University Shuttle Program.

The majority of NTU papers selected for presentation at ISSCC had to do with cabled transmission, and the topics ranged from 65 nanometer process high frequency Phase Locked Loop (PPL) technology, 65 nanometer process leakage current suppression techniques, 130 GHz frequency dividers, 20Gbps full rate linear time clock data recovery to ultra low noise clock generator and millimeter multi-mode frequency dividers. In addition, in the wireless area, NTU's papers had to do with system on chips for 60 GHz transceivers, and in the digital area the papers were about HDTV image encoders and bio-medical digital processors as well as systems on chips for medical transmissions.

he theme of ISSCC 2009 centers around "Adaptive Circuits and Systems", and the discussions will be focused on exploring the continual progress made by semiconductor industry in the filed of nanotechnology, as can be seen from signal processing, data storage, to icro-power consumption and wireless communication systems. As the result of these technical breakthroughs, the complexity of related electronic circuitry keeps increasing. With the growing popularity of integrated system on chips in recent years, the number of transistors in a SOC could very well amount to more than 1 billion after all the sub-circuits are integrated in a single chip. In today's world where energy saving is of paramount importance, whether consideration is given to low power consumption, reliability, or the adjustments between the sub-systems, the framework of adaptive circuits and systems will provide operational parameters which can dynamically adjust the integrated chips at any time to achieve the best performance and power consumption. As the technology of nano-circuitry continues to mature, there are many technical difficulties that need to be overcome, such as enhancing the ability of digital circuits to handle complexity issues, using digital circuit loop to dynamically control high standard analog circuits and dynamically controlling and integrating the radio frequency interface circuits, etc. In view of these, the contributors of papers to ISSCC need to demonstrate their ability in providing relevant adaptive circuits and systems, while at the same time strive towards developing new systems in the hope of making contributions to the evolution of human living.

ISSCC 2009 held a press conference at the Grand Hyatt Taipei on November 26th, 2008 to announce the illustrious achievements of Taiwan in the area of solid state circuitry. Elites from various circles of the solid state circuit industry gathered to share knowledge and to conduct technological exchanges. Gatherings such as this helped enhance Taiwan semiconductor industry's position in the international arena, while demonstrating NTU's strength and reputation at the same time.