IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Summer 2018 - 91

con ference reports

Highlights of CICC 2018
A Meeting of the Minds in Southern California

The 39th annual IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC 2018)
was held 8-11 April 2018 in San Diego,
California. The conference, sponsored by the IEEE Solid-State Circuits
Society (SSCS), enjoyed strong support from the local IC industry and
academia and an excellent level of
worldwide participation.
CICC 2018 continued the conference's trend of rapid growth in attendees. It achieved the highest number of
participants in the last nine years, with
a total of 358 conference registrants;
this was a 9.8% increase from CICC 2017
and 26.5% more than CICC 2015! The
conference also attained a total of 104
student attendees, a nearly 14% jump
over CICC 2017, showing a substantial
increase of conference attendance from
academia and young professionals. All
of these successes would not have been
possible without the dedicated work of
our IEEE CICC Technical Program Committee members, incredible support
from the IEEE and SSCS, and generous
sponsorship of our industry backers.
CICC 2018 officially opened on
Monday, 9 April, with a keynote presentation from Dr. Mark Pinto, chief
executive officer of Blue Danube Systems, which reviewed the history and
attributes of existing massive multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) and
phased-array systems, outlined their
limitations in complex commercial use
cases, and presented innovations in
analog ICs and radio system architectures that together enable novel hybrid
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSSC.2018.2844701
Date of publication: 13 August 2018

Behind the scenes at the CICC 2018 Conference Steering Committee meeting.

Dr. Alessandro Piovaccari, 2018 CICC
Conference chair, presents at the CICC
plenary session.

SSCS President Prof. Bram Nauta presents
at the CICC plenary session.

massive MIMO systems. With its technology-focused nature, the talk was
well received.
The education sessions have been
a key feature of the CICC. This year,
all four education sessions were scheduled on the Sunday, 8 April, preceding
the conference's technical sessions to
minimize possible attendance conflicts with regular paper presentations. Admission to these sessions was
included with the regular conference
registration, making them a great addition for the conference participants

to receive systematic and top-down
tutorials. The four education sessions
covered advanced IC-related topics
on data converters, frequency synthesis and clocking, millimeter-wave
(mm-wave) circuits and systems, and
low-power circuits for the Internet of
Things (IoT). Education session materials will soon be available online for
SSCS members. The exact dates and
the portal will be communicated via
the SSCS e-newsletter and website.
CICC 2018 presented a strong technical program focusing on solid-state

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IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Summer 2018

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