South China University of Technology (SCUT) has recently made significant progress on integrated circuit (IC) design. Two first-author papers, from Associate Professor Huang Mo with School of Electronic and Information Engineering (SEIE), were accepted by the IEEE International Solid-State Circuit Conference (ISSCC) 2017 hold in San Francisco, USA. These two papers are titled: “An Output-Capacitor-Free Analog-Assisted Digital Low-Dropout Regulator with Tri-loop Control” and “A Reconfigurable Bidirectional Wireless Power Transceiver with Maximum Current Charging Mode and 58.6% Battery-to-Battery Efficiency”.

Joining SCUT in 2016, Prof Huang mainly focuses on the research of power management and wireless power transfer techniques, and has made significant breakthroughs. The two papers accepted are within these scopes as well: one demonstrates an output-capacitor-free digital low dropout regulator (D-LDO) for the first time, while the other firstly shows a bidirectional wireless power transferring IC. These two papers have drawn high attention in ISSCC 2017, which are considered to be useful in IoT, mixed-signal SoC and Biomedical applications.

ISSCC is the topmost and largest conference in solid-state circuits/IC design. ISSCC have been drawing attention from both industry and academy ever since, because most of the breakthrough and landmark designs in IC history have been firstly published here. Consequently, it has been named as “Chip Olympics”. For ISSCC 2017, totally 208 papers have been accepted, which are all from the topmost universities, institutes, and IC design companies all around the world. However, for mainland China, only 19 first-author papers have been published since the first ISSCC in 1953. Therefore, the two papers from Prof Huang accepted by ISSCC 2017 indicates the breakthrough made by SCUT IC design team.

ISSCC is the largest and largest academic conference in the field of integrated circuit design. Throughout the history of integrated circuits, many breakthrough innovations and milestone products are first released here, so much attention in the field of industry and academia, known as the chip Olympic. The ISSCC has 208 papers selected, all from world-class universities, research institutes and top integrated circuit companies. From the first time (1953) to date, mainland China only published papers in ISSCC 19, only Tsinghua University and Fudan University was selected. Professor Huang Mo, the two papers selected, marked the South China University of Technology microelectronics research team in the field of integrated circuit design made significant progress, the team part of the research results have reached world-class level.