Keynote Speech: "Nanosystems: devices, circuits, architectures and applications" - Professor Giovanni De Micheli

photo prof. Giovanni De Micheli

Professor Giovanni De Micheli, EPFL, Lausanne

Nanosystems: devices, circuits, architectures and applications
Much of our economy and way of living will be affected by nanotechnologies in the decade to come and beyond. Mastering materials at the molecular level and their interaction with living matter opens up unforeseeable horizons. This talk deals with how we will conceive, design and use nanosystems, i.e., integrated systems exploiting nanodevices.  Whereas switching circuits and microelectronics have been the enablers of computer and communication systems, nanosystems have the potentials to realize innovative computational fabrics whose applications require broader hardware abstractions, extended software layers and with a much higher complexity level overall.  The abstraction of computation, the nanosystem architecture, the technological feasibility envelope and the multivariate design optimization problems pose challenging and disruptive research questions that this talk will address.
Giovanni De Micheli is Professor and Director of the Institute of Electrical Engineering and of the Integrated Systems Centre at EPF Lausanne, Switzerland. He is program leader of the Nano-Tera.ch program. Previously, he was Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University.He holds a Nuclear Engineer degree (Politecnico di Milano, 1979), a M.S. and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (University of California at Berkeley, 1980 and 1983).

Prof. De Micheli is a Fellow of ACM and IEEE and a member of the Academia Europaea. His research interests include several aspects of design technologies for integrated circuits and systems, such as synthesis for emerging technologies, networks on chips and 3D integration. He is also interested in heterogeneous platform design including electrical components and biosensors, as well as in data processing of biomedical information. He is author of: Synthesis and Optimization of Digital Circuits, McGraw-Hill, 1994, co-author and/or co-editor of eight other books and of over 500 technical articles. His citation h-index is 74 according to Google Scholar. He is member of the Scientific Advisory Board of IMEC and STMicroelectronics.

Prof. De Micheli is the recipient of the 2012 IEEE/CAS Mac Van Valkenburg award for contributions to theory, practice and experimentation in design methods and tools and of the 2003 IEEE Emanuel Piore Award for contributions to computer-aided synthesis of digital systems. He received also the Golden Jubilee Medal for outstanding contributions to the IEEE CAS Society in 2000, the D. Pederson Award for the best paper on the IEEE Transactions on CAD/ICAS in 1987, and several Best Paper Awards, including DAC (1983 and 1993), DATE (2005) and Nanoarch (2010).

He has been serving IEEE in several capacities, namely: Division 1 Director (2008-9), co-founder and President Elect of the IEEE Council on EDA (2005-7), President of the IEEE CAS Society (2003), Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on CAD/ICAS (1987-2001). He has been Chair of several conferences, including DATE (2010), pHealth (2006), VLSI SOC (2006), DAC (2000) and ICCD (1989). He is a founding member of the ALaRI institute at Universita' della Svizzera Italiana (USI), in Lugano, Switzerland, where he is currently scientific counselor.