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Workshop on little power supplies a BIG success!
 he 4th International Power Supply on Chip (PwrSoC) Workshop convened October 6, 7, and 8 in Boston MA. The PwrSoC Events are sponsored by PSMA Power Electronics Packaging Committee and IEEE/PELS and have been held every two years since the first workshop in Cork, Ireland in 2008. We are pleased to report that the 2014 Workshop was a splendid success with a record 190 attendees. A majority 72% of attendees were from US/Canada, 20% from Europe and 7% from Asia. It was great to see many commercial companies contributing to our Workshop with a 65/35 balance between industry and academia participants.
Hosted by NUCOE
Arnold Alderman of Anagenesis, this year’s General Chair, opened the Workshop with a welcome to the attendees and stated that, “We are fortunate to have Northeastern University College of Engineering (NUCOE) host our Workshop. Our activities will be held on multiple levels of the Curry Student Center in the heart of the university campus.” Professors Nian Sun and Brad Lehman both of NUCOE provided additional opening remarks to welcome the participants to hospitality and diverse activities of Boston and to take advantage of the enthusiasm of the university environment. The workshop opening was highlighted by a welcome from NUCOE Dean Nadine Aubry, wishing us a very creative and exciting three days at Northeastern University. We expressed our delight to have the additional support from Platinum Partner Altera Corporation, and Silver Partner Mag Layers, Inc.
Outstanding Technical Program
The Workshop success can be attributed to our outstanding Technical Program of 33 invited presentations (http://pwrsoc2014.org/presentations.html) and 32 posters (http://pwrsoc2014.org/poster.html). This year we included a plenary session appropriately chaired by Cian O’Mathuna. We heard visionary talks by Bruno Allard from Ampere-Lab, Lyon, France; Seth Sanders from UC Berkeley, and Francesco Carobolante from Qualcomm. The technical sessions, led by Matt Wilkowski, Program Chair, started with identifying strategies that address system, topology and circuit approaches to meet the requirements of both present and emerging applications. It included responding to the demand ever-greater current density, optimized control, form factor reduction, higher efficiency, while reducing cost.
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Accordingly, the remainder of the workshop focused on the integration of both modular and granular commercially successful miniature power converters that include magnetic and capacitor power passive elements designed for multiple applications. Presentations on power semiconductors, device packaging, and manufacturing filled out the rest of the sessions with an eye towards on-die integration and integration within package.
The presentations and e-posters will be downloadable from a password protected section of the Power Supply on Chip Workshop website beginning in late November. After June 2015, the presentations and e-posters will be downloadable from a publically accessible section of the website. We believe the workshop’s success was also largely derived by the incredible increasing global interest in power supply on chip development and commercialization. That interest level was validated by the boundless interactive dialogue during the Q&A portion of the technical sessions that spilled over into the breaks and the reception on Monday night.
New – E-posters
We always complement our technical sessions with a poster session that provides an opportunity for many more participants to share their ideas and work that encompasses all of the PwrSoC technical disciplines. This year we upgraded our poster session with interactive flat-panel displays. The posters session of the technical sessions allowing in-depth one-on-one dialogue between the attendees and the presenters using the synergy of e-posters as a vehicle to initiate discussion for thirty plus relevant topics over a three-hour period.
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Our Tour
Additionally, Professors Nian Sun and Brad Lehman organized tours of electrical engineering laboratories acquainting attendees with the many relevant and significant research programs ongoing at Northeastern University capably and enthusiastically presented by NUCOE’s next generation power electronics engineers and scientists.
Awards and Recognitions
The PwrSoC Workshop has had strong leadership from its beginning. The PwrSoC Events Steering Committee, fully recognizing this, surprised Dr. Cian O'Mathuna with the PwrSoC Events Founder's award for all of his effort to create the PwrSoC Workshop and nurture it into a mainstream event. The Steering Committee also presented an award of appreciation to Dr. Seth Sanders for his strong leadership as General Chair of PwrSoC 2012 Workshop. The success of PwrSoC 2014 is owed to the tireless efforts of the members of our Organizing and our Technical Program Committees. These committees were represented by Altera, Ampere–Lab, Anagenesis, Analog Devices, AT&S, Dartmouth University, GLOBAL FOUNDRIES, Infineon, Lion Semiconductor, LTEC, Maxim, MIT, Northeastern University, Qualcomm, Tyndall National Institute, UC Berkeley , University Polytechnic Madrid, University Polytechnic Catalunya, , University of Toronto, and the US Army Research Laboratory.
Making Our Next Workshop Even Better
At the end of the workshop technical sessions, the organizing committees completed an assessment of the current workshop based on feedback and comments from the attendees. The assessment would form a basis for improvements for future workshops. Past assessments led to: our having more networking time at various points throughout the workshop; a Monday evening reception; interactive dialogue during the Q&A portion of the technical sessions; continuing a bi-annual agenda; holding the workshop multiple global regions; and staying with the workshop format rather than moving on to a conference format.
To Madrid Next
Then, we started planning for our next workshop. The PwrSoC Events are alternately led by IEEE/PELS and PSMA. Accordingly, the next workshop will be held in the fall of 2016, in Madrid Spain led by IEEE/PELS, with José Cobos from the Technical University of Madrid (UPM) as general chair. PSMA will be leading the PwrSoC Workshop in 2018. Location yet to be determined.
PELS Papers Opportunity
In the interim between the current workshop and the 2016 workshop, IEEE/PELS is organizing an editorial team to create an issue of the Journal of Emerging and Selected Topics in Power Electronics (JESTPE) dedicated to Power Supply on Chip focusing key papers written on the technologies enabling PwrSoC development. Although this journal is not directly associated with the PwrSoC workshop series, it complements the PwrSoC workshop series, allowing presenters and attendees the opportunity to formally publish their ideas and realizations. We strongly believe that interest and participation in the PwrSoC workshop series will continue to grow as PwrSoC technologies are commercialized based on the ideas, interactions and networking that are cultivated by these workshops. Our thanks to both PSMA and PELS for their support in making these workshops possible and to all of the members of the steering, organizing and technical committees which is best expressed as the following quote from Cian O’Mathuna: “it was great to participate in the workshop again this year. It was an excellent event. Congratulations to everyone who made it happen. ”
Provided by Matt Wilkowski, Altera Corporation, Program Chair
and Arnold Alderman, Anagenesis Inc., General Chair
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