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Reports on the 2004 Symposium on VLSI Technology and the accompanying VLSI Circuits Symposium to be held on the week of June 15 in Honolulu, Hawaii. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.'s plan to discuss the reliability concerns of using relatively porous low-k dielectrics with a k-value of 2.2; Shinichi Takagi's consideration of presenting work from Japan's government-supported MIRAI project that combines the advantages of silicon germanium.

The article reports on the collaboration of Mark Horowitz and Bill Dally of the Stanford University along with researchers of Rambus Inc. in a research paper that focuses on a new low in input/output power in the U.S. Both Horowitz and Dally are respected in interconnect issues. Dally admits that he is enjoying his collaboration with the company and Horowitz.

This article reports that ultrathin displays and e-paper took center stage at the Americas Display Engineering and Applications Conference in Portland, Oregon, with researchers reporting progress and predicting a 2006 deployment. Nick Colaneri, associate director of the Flexible Display Center at Arizona State University in Tempe, Florida, outlined progress at that Army-funded center for the process development and pilot production of flexible backplanes and displays. The target technology is organic pentacene transistors that can be fabricated at a cool 90 degrees C, as well as other low-temperature formulations, for which the team uses in-house electrophoretic front-plane lamination. Conference goers also heard of advances in LCD technology and in military-grade head-mounted displays.

Announces the opening of a factory for the production of electronic paper by Gyricon Media Inc. in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Reports on the call issued by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the California State University at Northridge for papers at the Virtual Reality and Persons with Disabilities conference.

Reports on the pilot programs launched in California to improve traffic management with intelligent vehicle highway systems (IVHS). Upgrade of the city's Motorist Information System; Monitoring of highway conditions using closed-circuit television and vehicle detection loops; Information from a highway advisory radio system using low-power transmitter; Use of an expert system to analyze information.

The article focuses on digital ballot box and electronic voting systems in the U.S. 11 top computer scientists will kick off a fresh push to set guidelines for electronic voting systems, in opposition to a parallel IEEE standards effort. Both groups are racing to meet a federal mandate to lay down in 2005 a broad set of national election standards. The efforts come as polling places lumber from hanging paper chads toward touchscreen systems that introduce a whole new set of problems. The scrutiny comes in the wake of the 2000 presidential election, when as many as 6 million votes were lost, 1.5 million of them due to difficulties using voting equipment, according to the CalTech/MIT Voting Technology Project. INSET: Security flaws won't stop deployment.

Focuses on the presentation of ferro-electric memories at the International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco, California. Overview of the research paper from Texas Instruments, Agilent Technologies and Ramtron International; Description of volt embedded-Ferrous random access memory technology; Details of the paper of Fujitsu.

This article reports that Room Temperature Superconductors Inc. holds two U.S. patents on the technology of room temperature superconductivity and has product plans for using it. The company believes that polypropylene can behave as a superconductor at room temperature. In the industrial form of polypropylene, the side chains attached to the molecule's carbon backbone are arranged in a regular pattern. This geometry promotes a type of crystalline packing that makes the polymer very strong. In the atactic form, which can be produced by using too much catalyst when the polymer is forming, the side chains are arranged in a totally random pattern. CEO Mark Goldes first heard about the compound in 1991, when he saw an abstract of a paper by Grigorov claiming the demonstration of superconduction at room temperature in a polymer.

Provides information on the 50th International Solid-State Circuits Conference that will be held on February 10, 2003 in San Francisco, California. Theme of the keynote speech that will be delivered by Gordon Moore, chairman emeritus of Intel Corp.; Paper sessions; Panels; Workshops.

Reports on the holding of the 48th International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco, California, from December 8-11, 2002. Topics of the opening papers session; Product introductions.

Reports on the development of postoptical lithography technology by high technology firms in the United States. Presentation of concept papers at International Sematech's Next Generation Lithography Workshop; Extreme-ultraviolet solution proposed by Intel Corp.; Electron-beam direct write technology being developed by IBM Corp.

Reports that IEEE-USA chairman Joel B. Snyder has presented a position paper to the United States Congress favoring expanded individual retirement accounts (IRAs). Republicans' proposal; Effectivity of IRAs.

Reports on Chrysler, Ford and General Motors' near completion of the Open Modular Architecture Controller (OMAC), a specification that will shift vehicle-manufacturing technologies from proprietary programmable-logic to an industry-wide standard based play-and-plug designs. Circulation of a white paper outlining the scheme; Impact of the OMAC on industrial automation; Reasons for the move to open standards.

Reports on the status of multimedia in the United States, according to the papers delivered in the Microprocessor Forum in California on October 1994. Multimedia's venture into embedded-systems design; Adding features of multimedia processing to available processors; Strategies of Advanced RISC Ltd. and Quantum Effect Designs.

The article recognizes the researcher George Robertson for his contributions in the study of human-computer interaction in the U.S. Robertson, who have coined the term "information visualization," has been inducted into the CHI Academy at the CHI2006 event in Quebec for his two papers depicting the incremental directions which Microsoft is headed. Information visualization is a presentation of data using nontraditional and interactive graphical forms.

Highlights the International Solid-State Circuits Conference which was held in the United States in February 2005. Chrontel, Freescale, STMicroelectronics' presentation of papers on tuners for various mobile television standards; Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers' description of an analog bionic ear processor with zero-crossing detection.

Reports on the 2204 Design Automation Conference on June 7-11 in San Diego, California. Theme of the conference; Number of accepted papers; Topics for discussion; Keynote speakers; Hands-on tutorials.

Examines some of the process-specific papers in the 2003 Custom Integrated Circuits Conference in San Jose, California. Embedded software; Novel circuit architectures; Memory paradigms and packaging challenges.

Reports that the Custom Integrated Circuits Conference will be moved from May to September 21-24, 2003 at the Doubletree Hotel in San Jose, California. Benefit of the change to attenders and presenters; Deadline for the submission of papers for the event.

Previews the 2002 International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) to be held in San Jose, California. Design-related papers, panels and workshops to be featured; Parallel workshops on the OpenAccess standards effort, open-source circuit simulation and languages; Opening keynote address to be given by Chekib Akrout, director of microprocessor development at IBM Microelectronics.

Reports on the broad-based research effort to integrate compound semiconductor devices with silicon circuits unveiled by the papers submitted for the 2001 International Electron Devices Meeting. Project of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia; Progress of a group at Japan's Nagoya Institute of Technology with direct integration of compound semiconductors on silicon substrates.

Reports on developments in the United States electronics industry as of April 1995. Establishment of a home page on the World Wide Web computer network by IntelliMatch Inc.; Call for papers issued by Texas Instruments Inc. for its TMS320 Educators Conference on August 10 to 11, 1995; Retirement of Max E. Bleck as president of Raytheon Co.

Editorial. Talks about the role of `EE Times' in informing engineers and technical management in the electronics industry in the United States. Technology journalism as a intensely competitive endeavor; Technology reporting as an industry in itself; `EE Times' monthly `White Paper.'

Presents conferences of interest to computer professionals. Industry Consulting Services' `Fundamentals of ASIC Design' workshop on November 14-15, 1996 in Santa Clara, California; Synopsys Users Group's call for papers for its annual SNUG North America '97 Conference; Association for Computing Machinery's conference and technology exposition in March 1997.

Reports that High-Performance System Design, a topic of Design SuperCon, 1996 will cover topics ranging from graphic subsystem and bus architectures to debug, verification and test regimes for a prototyping environment. How program development manager Margery Conner has assembled 60 wide-ranging papers; Presentation by engineers Jack Ganssle and Jon Powell.