Events Calendar

Integrated Systems Seminar Series

Speaker: Prof. Sorin P. Voinigescu, University of Toronto

Talk Title: In the clouds: Towards 1Tb/s per carrier

Abstract: We all know that power consumption in digital circuits increases linearly with frequency and with the square of the supply voltage. Yet, instead of reducing the supply voltage of circuits to save power we are limiting speed and increasing parallelism. Why is that?
Although computation is more efficient than communication we are choosing parallel architectures to increase the amount of communication on a microprocessor chip.
We are all addicted to wireless mobile devices but wireless communication is 1-2 orders of magnitude more inefficient than wired communication.
We are migrating our data storage to the cloud, worst still, to the mobile cloud, requiring longer and less efficient communication links to store and retrieve our data.
At the current energy consumption rate, neither the datacenters nor the cloud are scalable beyond 1-2 generations.
These problems and potential solutions, at the transistor, circuit and system level, will be touched upon in this talk.

Biography: Prof. Sorin P. Voinigescu received the M.Sc. degree in electronics from the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest, Romania, in 1984, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Toronto, Canada, in 1994.
Between 1994 and 2002 he was first with Nortel Networks and later with Quake Technologies in Ottawa, Canada, where he was responsible for projects in high-frequency characterization and statistical scalable compact model development for Si, SiGe, and III-V devices. He later conducted research on wireless and optical fiber building blocks and transceivers in these technologies. In 2002 he joined the University of Toronto, where he is a full Professor. His research and teaching interests focus on nano-scale semiconductor devices and their application in integrated circuits at frequencies beyond 300 GHz. In 2008-2009 he spent a sabbatical year at Fujitsu Laboratories of America, Sunnyvale, CA, USA.
Dr. Voinigescu is a member of the ITRS RF/AMS Committee and of the TPCs of the IEEE CSICS and BCTM. He received NORTEL’s President Award for Innovation in 1996 and is a co-recipient of the Best Paper Award at the 2001 IEEE CICC, the 2005 IEEE CSICS, and of the Beatrice Winner Award at the 2008 IEEE ISSCC. His students have won Student Paper Awards at the 2004 VLSI Circuits Symposium, the 2006 SiRF Meeting, RFIC Symposium and BCTM, and at the 2008 and 2012 International Microwave Symposium.
Dr. Voinigescu was the co-founder and CTO of two start-ups: Quake Technologies, which developed and commercialized the world's first 10-Gb/s SONNET and 10-Gb/s Ethernet transceivers in 2001, and of Peraso Technologies Inc, which has just announced the first antenna-in-package 60-GHz transceiver selling at 5 dollars in quantities of over 100,000. None of those products were in CMOS!

Host: Prof. Hossein Hashemi, Prof. Mahta Moghaddam, Prof. Mike Chen

More Info: http://mhi.usc.edu/activities/integrated-systems/

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Hossein Hashemi

Event Link: http://mhi.usc.edu/activities/integrated-systems/