Optimizing Transceivers to Minimize BER

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Although our communication links are generally designed and optimized to maximize SNR, that doesn’t necessarily minimize the bit error rate. The situation gets worse once forward error correction (FEC) is taken into account. Join us at ISCAS 2021 in the special session on Advanced Energy-Efficient Wireline & Optical Communications where Ph.D. candidate Ming Yang will present our paper on the relevant tradeoffs in modern wireline links. He’ll show how we can do better!

Prof. Chan Carusone Named Editor-In-Chief of SSC-L

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I’m very excited to be the new Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Letters (SSC-L)!

SSC-L publishes short papers on novel integrated circuit (IC) ideas and experimental results with a faster turnaround than its sister publication, the Journal of Solid-State Circuits. Prof. Behzad Razavi was the publication’s founding Editor-in-Chief. Over the past three years, he assembled a distinguished editorial board and editorial review board and oversaw the publication’s steady growth. We should all be grateful for his service to the community.

I now look forward to working with SSC-L’s outstanding volunteers to build on the publication’s unique strengths as a venue for IC research. Our ability to publish a peer-reviewed paper to a worldwide audience within three months of submission is tremendously valuable to many authors. Likewise, readers trying to stay abreast of our fast-moving field benefit from a constant stream of the latest results. I hope to raise awareness of these strengths while maintaining our high-quality peer-review process on a fast turnaround. Doing so will accelerate progress on significant IC research problems and facilitate the rapid translation of research results into tangible benefits for all of humanity.

ISSCC 2021 Forum on Wireline Transceivers

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I’m chairing a forum on Optical and Electrical Transceivers for 400GbE and Beyond at this year’s International Solid-State Circuits Conference. Eight 45-minute forum presentations from experts in industry and academia go live on February 12. We’ll then have a live Q&A with the presenters on February 22. Register for the conference to get access at isscc.org.

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I’m looking for an accomplished researcher to help lead our efforts on high-speed optoelectronic computing and communication. As a post-doctoral fellow, you’d have the unique opportunity to collaborate across disciplines and sectors (academia & industry) on a well-resourced project in an emerging field. If you’re interested in joining us and have a background in IC design and/or integrated photonics, please send your CV to contact@isl.utoronto.ca within the next 10 days.

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Simulations to accurately predict error probabilities below 10-15 in communication links with forward error correction used to take 1000’s years on a typical desktop. Ph.D. Candidate Ming Yang has developed techniques that allow us to do it in under a minute. With the help of our industry partners, the techniques have been validated on real wireline links at 60 Gbps. If you missed him present the techniques at DesignCon in Santa Clara, January 2020, then read about it in our recently-published open-access paper.

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Two ISL alumni presented back-to-back to a packed crowd of over 400 researchers at the ISSCC 2019 session on “Advanced Wireline Techniques” Wednesday afternoon, February 20th in San Francisco: congratulations to Shayan Shahramian and Masum Hossain. In total, six ISL alumni were authors on ISSCC papers this year.