Abstract: Design and testing methodologies for analog/RF ICs have always been lagging behind the more automated flows and cost-effective testing solutions that purely digital ICs have been benefiting from. Historically, the pricing associated with mixed-signal functions may have afforded that. However, today's low-cost mixed-signal and RF transceiver system-on-chip (SoC) products typically incorporate extensive amounts of digital logic, processors and memory in a single die, and cannot afford high-cost testing and low production yields. Although the mixed signal circuitry may represent a small portion of such SoC, the variability experienced in its performance, due to the inevitable process variations, may dominate the testing costs and the production yield for the entire SoC, thereby greatly impacting profitability. This is particularly the case when conventional "test limit" approaches are used, and parametric performance is measured in production testing. The "Soft Specifications" approach offers a cost effective solution for high-volume low-cost mixed-signal SoCs, while ensuring that the targeted user-perceived quality expectations are met. This results in cost savings for both the silicon vendor and the end-product manufacturers, which are otherwise forced to 'leave money on the table' by the conventional approach. The "Soft Specifications" approach is based on statistical rather than rigid performance specifications, and on production testing that is primarily structural rather than parametric. A necessary element in this approach is the implementation of built-in calibration and compensation ("self-healing") mechanisms, involving built-in measurements, signal processing and parameter adjustment (voltage, timing, etc.). The talk will present the fundamentals of this approach and provide several examples of its implementation in low-cost wireless transceivers.
Dr. Oren Eliezer received his bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from the Tel-Aviv University, in 1988 and 1997 and his PhD from the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) in 2008. 
He has over 25 years of experience in the design and productization of digital communication systems and semiconductors for telecom and wireless applications. After serving for 6 years as an engineer in the Israeli military, he co-founded Butterfly Communications, which was acquired by Texas Instruments (TI) in 1999. He was relocated by TI to Dallas in 2002, where he coined the term On-chip Radio Built-in-Tester (ORBiT™) and was elected senior member of the technical staff. He has authored and coauthored over 50 journal and conference papers and over 45 patents, and has given over 50 invited talks related to communication system design and productization. He is a senior member of the IEEE, serves on the steering committee of the IEEE RFIC conference, has chaired the program committee for several IEEE conferences in Texas, and participates in the research at the Texas Analog Center for Excellence at UTD.
Abstract: The human race has invested about a trillion dollars in the development of semiconductor electronics, and our lives have been improved greatly as a result. Smart devices are now taken for granted and permeate every aspect of our daily lives. One of the important products of this huge investment was the development of sophisticated design optimization and simulation tools to allow the largely automated design and verification of integrated circuits. Sometimes we in the EDA community do not realize quite how advanced we are in this field, and just how applicable much of the Silicon R&D work is to other areas... This talk will be about one such area, namely that of Proton Radiation Cancer Therapy, where a team at IBM, working with researchers at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Research center, have been busy applying knowledge from the VLSI area to this important problem. We will show examples of applying large scale analysis and optimization techniques to the treatment planning problem, and hopefully motivate other EDA researchers to seek applications of their deep knowledge in adjacent fields.
Dr. Sani Nassif received his Bachelors degree with Honors from the American University of Beirut in 1980, and his Masters and PhD degrees from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1981 and 1985 respectively.
He then worked for ten years at Bell Laboratories in the general area of technology CAD, focusing on various aspects of design and technology coupling including device modeling, parameter extraction, worst case analysis, design optimization and circuit simulation. While at Bell Labs, working under Larry Nagel -the original author of Spice, he led a large team in the development of an in-house circuit simulator, named Celerity, which became the main circuit simulation tool at Bell Labs. In January 1996, he joined the then newly formed IBM Austin Research Laboratory (ARL), which was founded with a specific focus on research for the support of IBM's Power computer systems. After ten years of management, he stepped down to focus on technical work again with an emphasis on applying techniques developed in the VLSI-EDA area to IBM's Smarter Planet initiative. In January 2014 Sani founded Radyalis, a company focused on applying VLSI-EDA techniques to the field of Cancer Proton Radiation Therapy. Sani has authored numerous conference and journal publications, and delivered many tutorials at top conferences. He has received Best Paper awards from TCAD, ICCAD, DAC, ISQED, ICCD and SEMICON, authored invited papers to ISSCC, IEDM, IRPS, ISLPED, HOTCHIPS, and CICC. He has given Keynote and Plenary presentations at Sasimi, ESSCIRC, BMAS, SISPAD, SEMICON, VLSI-SOC, PATMOS, NMI, ASAP, GLVLSI, TAU, and ISVLSI. He is an IEEE Fellow, a member of the IBM Academy of Technology, a member of the ACM and the AAAS, and an IBM master inventor with more than 50 patents. Dr. Nassif is the president of the IEEE Council on EDA (CEDA), and was the General chair of the ICCAD conference in 2008. He has previously also served on the technical program committee of ICCAD, DAC and ISQED, and on the executive committee of ISPD. He has received the Penrose award (given to one outstanding graduate from the American University of Beirut), the Distinguished Member of Technical Staff award from Bell Labs, two Research Accomplishment Awards from IBM, and the SRC Mahboob-Khan Outstanding Mentor awards from the SRC.
