Keynote: " Mixed-signal design automation - change you can believe in " by Mar Hershenson from Magma-DA, USA.

Abstract: Analog design methodology has not changed in the last thirty years. Analog design is still performed manually by experienced engineers running SPICE and using basic editors. Although there have been many attempts to automate the analog design flow, none have been successful.

In the recent years, the demands on analog design efficiency have changed dramatically. The reasons are multiple: the amount of analog integrated in a system-on-chip has increased significantly, the complexity of an analog circuit has gone from a few hundred transistors to tens of thousands digitally assisted transistors, the process technology has continued to decrease the overall "quality" of the analog transistors, the requests on smaller time-to-market, etc. In this talk, I will describe some of the new design methodologies that are being adapted in industry and how the use of efficient automation tools can make a design team noticeably more efficient. A new, more formal, structured, top-down design flow will substitute the more ad-hoc design flow.

Invited Talk: "Wireless Interfacing with the Central Nervous System" by Maysam Ghovanloo from Georgia Tech.

mghovan@ece.gatech.edu

Click here to download Slides.

Developing new technologies to better aid people with disabilities is one of the major challenges that scientists and engineers aspire to undertake in the 21st century. There are 250 million people with disabling hearing and 180 million with visual impairments in the world. Paralysis, one of the most common debilitating results of severe damage to the nervous system, particularly among young adults, accounts for hundreds of thousands of new cases each year due to traffic accidents, acts of violence, or falls. Advanced implantable microsystems have allowed the application of integrated microelectronics to the human nervous system, and reached a level of maturity that can produce enormous benefits to patients. These devices have made possible the development of neuroprosthetic devices that are aimed at restoring sensory, motor, and cognitive functions lost through injury or disease. Hundreds of thousands of people have already been helped by neuroprosthetic devices such as cochlear implants that restore hearing to the deaf, functional electrical stimulators that help the paralyzed move, deep brain stimulators that treat neurological movement disorders, and spinal cord stimulators that relieve those in chronic pain. However, there are still many challenges that need to be resolved for these technologies to become safer, more effective, and widely acceptable. Reducing the size and power consumption of implantable devices, while improving their efficiency and bandwidth are among the issues that we are trying to address. In this talk, I will highlight some of our recent progress in developing custom integrated circuits and microsystems for wireless interfacing with the central nervous systems for clinical and neuroscience research applications.

Maysam Ghovanloo was born in 1973 in Tehran. He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran, in 1994 and the M.S. (Hons.) degree in biomedical engineering from the Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 1997. He also received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI in 2003 and 2004, respectively. His Ph.D. research was on developing a wireless microsystem for micromachined neural stimulating microprobes.

In December 1998 he founded Sabz-Negar Rayaneh Co. Ltd., Tehran, Iran, to design and manufacture physiology and pharmacology research laboratory instruments. In the summer of 2002, he was with the Advanced Bionics Inc., Sylmar, CA, working on spinal-cord stimulators. From 2004 to 2007 he was an assistant professor at the department of electrical and computer engineering in the North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, where he founded and directed the NC-Bionics Laboratory. In June 2007 he joined the faculty of Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, where he is an assistant professor, ON Semiconductor junior faculty chair, and founding director of the GT-Bionics Lab in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Dr. Ghovanloo is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, Part II. He has been a member of the technical program committee for the IEEE Midwest Circuits and Systems (MWSCAS), International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS), and Biomedical Circuits and Systems (BioCAS) conferences. He has organized special sessions on Neuroengineering Circuits & Microsystems at the ISCAS’07 and ISCAS’08 as well as Modern Assistive Technologies at the EMBS’07 conferences. He has also served as a technical reviewer for major IEEE and IoP journals in the areas of circuits, systems, and biomedical engineering. He has received awards in the operational category of the 40th and 41st DAC/ISSCC student design contest in 2003 and 2004, respectively. He is a member of Tau Beta Pi, Sigma Xi, and IEEE Solid-State Circuits, Circuits and Systems, and Engineering in Medicine and Biology societies.