The 2012 Circuits and Systems Society Forum on Emerging and Selected Topics (CAS-FEST) event will be the third event in the series organized by IEEE CAS Society and will be held on May 20th, 2012, in conjunction with ISCAS 2012, at the COEX center, Seoul, South Korea. Previously, CAS-FEST 2010 was held in conjunction with ICECS 2010, in Athens, Greece and focused on Variation-Aware Design for Nano-scale VLSI, while CAS-FEST 2011 was held in conjunction ISCAS 2011, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and focused on Brain Machine Interfaces. The topic of the CAS-FEST 2012 will be heterogenous nano circuits and systems.
In recent years we have observed spectacular advancements in the area of nano-circuits and systems at several levels, from material and device level to system and application level. It is the purpose of this event to provide the attendees with a cross-section view of nano-electronics at various levels.
New emerging materials provide us with a wealth of new devices such as (silicon) nano-wires, graphene and carbon nano-tubes fabricated in several distinct technologies. Such devices have specific properties, such as memresistivity and ambipolarity. Applications include, but are not limited to, new memory structures, new super-capacitors, and nano-bio-sensors based on hybrid structures connecting DNA and proteins to a nano-electronic substrate.
At the system level, we see the useful and prolific combination of components such as sensors and data acquisition systems, energy harvesting and storage units, signal conditioning, processing and communication subsystems etc. designed in heterogeneous technologies (e.g., in various silicon and carbon technologies). Such systems require research in related areas, such nano-architectures, fault-tolerant nano-computing, self-assembly of nano-structures, heterogeneous nano-structures for biomedical diagnostics and nano-scale image processing.
At the application level, we witness prototypes and products for personalized medicine (e.g., chemical and biological analysis, medical stimulators, labs-on-chips), for environmental control (e.g., sensor networks, smart buildings, smart city, smart grid) and for the consumer market (e.g. next generation cell phone systems, image and signal sensors/processors) and many others.
All these systems have an increasingly larger presence of heterogeneous materials/technologies, heterogeneous types of signals, heterogeneous components, heterogeneous sub-systems - all at nano scale! Analysis and design of such heterogeneous nano circuits and systems is a very important and only a partially solved problem to date. As it can be expected, these problems will become more prominent in the coming years with further development and mixing of technologies and implementations, including 3D integration of circuits and systems.
