The Taipei Chapter of Solid State Circuits Society held a "2009 ISSCC Press Conference" on November 25th. President Si-Chen Lee, 2010 ISSCC Executive Committee Chair Anantha Chandrakasan, Dr. Nicky Lu, Chairman of Etron Technologies and many elites from academia and industry attended the press conference and delivered their speeches on the general conditions of ISSCC 2010 conference, the essence of the annual papers, the trend of the global semiconductor industry and Taiwan's showcase technologies.

ISSCC is known as the Olympic seminar in the field of circuit design, and is the best forum for the exchange of top notch technologies for international scholars. The ISSCC 2010 will be anchored around the theme of "Sensing the Future." From 1953, the IEEE Solid State Circuits Society (IEEE SSCS) was responsible for organizing the annual ISSCC. This seminar is not only an important indicator of the trends of R&D in the most advanced global solid state circuits industries, but also the highest tabernacle for unveiling the newest technologies in integrated circuit design. In this sense, ISSCC can be said to be the Olympiad of the integrated circuit design society,

ISSCC can be said to be the leader of the world's high technology enterprises. In 2010, ISSCC will be held in San Francisco from February 7th to 11th. For this important conference, a total of 210 papers will be presented, and Taiwan has 9, occupying 5 percentage of the total. In terms of contributions, Taiwan will be ranked 6th in the world. Among these 9 papers selected by ISSCC and to be presented in the conference, 6 of them were presented by NTU.

The standards of research and development this year have seen much progress, and the large factories from the world enthusiastically participate in the conference. This year's number of papers from Taiwan dropped slightly compared to the preceding years, but the papers presented will demonstrate global breakthroughs in the respective technological areas, so Taiwan's capability at research and development will be fully demonstrated in the international semi-conductor industry where competition is becoming fiercer by the day.

The papers presented by Taiwan are spread over all areas, of which wireless communications, data converters and digital multi-media chips constitute the bulk, with two papers in each area. In the area of wireless communications, the long distance anti-collision radar system, which was made by NTU through the CMOS processing, using 77-GHz radar to detect any obstacles in the driveway, can detect the speed and distance of the vehicle and the range of detection can reach up to 100 meters or more. This is so far the only long range integrated circuit radar detection system in the world, and uses up a very low power consumption. Once put into mass production, not only luxury cars, but ordinary vehicles can detect any obstacles in the driveway, so it is considered to be a major breakthrough for the automobile industry. In addition, in the 60 GHz indoor wireless image transmission systems, Media Tek unveiled a low voltage power amplifier device, which used novel circuit techniques to break the framework of traditional circuitry, thereby significantly improving the output power.

In the area of data converters, National Taiwan University and National Cheng-Kung University used different technologies and each presents a low power high resolution analog-digital converter, with a resolution reaching up to 10 bytes, and the rate of power consumption is lower than 5mW. In the area of wireless transmission applications, National Taiwan University will demonstrate a converter which can be used in 100G Ethernet, and whose production process used the inexpensive CMOS, thereby pushing the installment of next generation high speed network one giant step forward.

With regard to digital image processing, the NTU research teams will present two papers. One of which has to do with a H.264 decoder chip that supports full HD, which not only increases the computing speed three times, but also reduces the power consumption rate by 50%. Another paper has to do with a multi-media analytical chip that has the functions of self-learning, which increases the computing speed and lowers the power consumption rate.

Bio-medicine has been quite popular in recent years. In this particular area, National Taiwan University will unveil an implantable pain controller which does not need batteries. It can receive external wireless signals which will stimulate the ganglion to reduce the pain. In the future this pain controller will devoid patients the risk of taking pain killers. In memory applications, National Tsing-hua University cooperated with Japan to issue a non-volatile flash memory (NAND-ROM) which needs only an ultra-low power supply (0.29 V). This can be widely used in hand-held electronic devices to improve the standby time.

The 2010 ISSCC conference will be anchored around the theme of "Sense the Future. In all the papers presented, IMMD (Imagers, MEMS, Medical and Display) which has to do with sensing technology is the largest area, occupying 12% of the total. In addition, high performance digital circuit is the fastest growing area, which sprung from 4% last year to 11% this year. This phenomenon indicates that although bio-medicine will continue to be a hot topic in the future, digital circuitry will become a key to winning for all R&D units.

Through the participation in the top of the world ISSCC international conference, our domestic semiconductor people can stay abreast to the development of the newest technologies, and gain an opportunity to acquire access to high-level technologies. And, during the agenda of the conference which lasts for a few days, the elites from our academia and industry will exchange their technologies and share their knowledge, which will not only solidify the important position of Taiwan's semi-conductor industry internationally, but will give concrete expression to the visibility and strength of our semiconductor research.