From Interconnect to Device: Analog Design for Scaled CMOS Electronics

In the last decade, highly scaled electronic systems have become increasing plagued by a variety of problems from inadequacy of electrical interconnect down to the inconsistency and poor performance of nanoscale devices. This is a wonderful thing for analog designers. The quest for real solutions to improve performance, previously masked with the progression of Moore’s law, now calls for renewed creativity and the development of fundamentally new approaches to circuit and architecture design. In this talk I will focus on two issues that have arisen as CMOS electronics has scaled into the nanometer regime. First, how do we meet the needs of modern silicon systems for interconnect performance? Second, how do we design electronics in the presence of device variation? In the context of my research, I will discuss some alternative approaches to these potentially confounding problems and how such problems can be addressed with skillful analog and mixed mode design.
Alyssa Apsel received the B. S. degree from Swarthmore College in 1995 the M. S. degree in electrical engineering from California Institute of Technology in 1996 and the Ph. D. degree in electrical engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 2002, respectively. She joined Cornell University in 2002, where she is now the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She has coauthored over 50 refereed publications in the fields of optical interconnect design and planning, photonic integration with VLSI, and analog circuit design, resulting in two patents and several pending patent applications. She received a best paper award at ASYNC 2006, had a MICRO “Top Picks” paper in 2006, received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2004, and was selected by Technology Review Magazine as one of the Top 100 Young Innovators in 2004. Dr. Apsel also serves on technical committees for ISCAS, ITCom, SPIE Photonics West, as a member of the Science and Engineering Council of the OSA, and as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I.