The Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering in association with ISTE Students' Chapter, PSG Institute Of Technology And Applied Research, Coimbatore organized a webinar on "Power - Aware IC Design" on June 12, 2021 (10.30-11.30 am). The resource person was Dr. Priya Venugopal, Principal Engineer Design Enablement Advance Circuit Design (ACD) - BLR Global Foundries, Bengaluru. More than 100 participants including faculty members and students from different institutions attended and were benefited from the webinar. The webinar was coordinated by Dr G Santhanamari, ASP and Ms M Deepa, AP from the Department of ECE.
Dr. Priya started the session by discussing in brief about integrated circuits (IC). She elaborated on the need for integrated circuits. She explained in detail about the need to reduce channel length of a transistor in order to accommodate more transistors in an IC. She also mentioned the transition in the decrease in channel length from 250 nm in 1997 to 7 nm now. She revealed that we carry a minimum of 14 IC chips with us always in our mobile phones and listed various applications of ICs. She explained in detail about Power - Aware IC design and the need. She later mentioned the areas where power - aware ICs are used such as smart cities, IoT, intelligent systems, home automation, autonomous vehicles and body sensor networks, and explained using a case study on the design of a Wearable Cardiac Activity Monitor IC.
She then threw light on some of the future market prospective for power - aware IC design such as energy harvesting, flexible electronics, pervasive sensing networks, implantable medical devices, AI/ML accelerators and Industrial IoT. Finally, she ended the session by giving some insights to take up a career in IC Designing and spoke in brief about the research happening worldwide in the area of semiconductor devices, circuit design and design verification.