October 24-27, 2021
Sponsored by PSMA and IEEE PELS

he 2021 Power Supply on Chip (PwrSoC) Workshop was successfully held as a hybrid event from October 24, through October 27, at the Singh Center for Nanotechnology on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia PA. Considering the difficult circumstances due to Covid-19, the workshop was still able to have a 40/60 split of in-person and on-line attendees while maintaining a safe environment for the in-person attendees. A few international in-person attendees were able to join the in-person audience which was predominantly from North America. As expected, the majority of the on-line attendees were from Europe and Asia-Pacific. The workshop continues to have near equal attendance between industry (57%) and research/academia (43%) and a strong global international interest typically favoring the host region. The global distribution of workshop attendees was North America (58%), Europe (22%) and Asia Pacific (20%).

In keeping with its history, this workshop  spotlighted the advanced technologies needed to build granular and modular power supplies and provided some compelling demonstrations of commercialized products that make a clear case that PwrSoC and PSiP technologies are becoming more prominent and mainstream.

The organizing team of world-renowned experts, innovators and pioneers of the Power Supply on Chip technology assembled the technical program for the nine technical sessions following the single-track format of past PwrSoC workshops.

• Plenary Session - Jose Cobos, University Polytechnic Madrid
• Systems and Applications - Francesco Carobolante, IoTissimo
• Topologies and Control - Bruno Allard, Université de Lyon
• Wideband Gap Integration - Brian Ma, University Texas Dallas
• Integrated Capacitors & Energy Storage - Mehdi Jatlaoui, Murata
• Integrated Magnetics - Masahiro Yamaguchi, Tohoku University Japan
• System Integrated Manufacturing and Packaging - Baoxing Chen, Analog Devices
• Granular Power - Santosh Kulkarni, Dialog Semiconductor
• Posters – Minjie Chen – Princeton University

There were a total of thirty-one lecture style presentations and fourteen poster presentations. Each of the seven technical disciplines of the workshop were represented by four lecture presentation and the plenary session added three technical presentations. The poster session covered topics from all of the technical disciplines of the workshop. As with past workshops, the balance between presenters from industry and presenters from research and academia was 50/50 indicating a strong acceptance by industry of the technology as well as continuing pursuit of further breakthroughs and innovations by research and academia. There also continues to be presentations provided by the three global regions with the global distribution of the presenters similar to that of the attendees.

The technical plenary session provided insights regarding the role of GaN, packaging architectures and integrated voltage regulators in the powering of electronics. The three plenary presenters were:

• Isik Kizilyalli,Associate Director of Technology of the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E),
• Ravi Mahajan, Intel Fellow and Director of Pathfinding for Assembly and Packaging Technologies for 7-nonometer silicon and beyond, and
• Tim Phillips,founder and Chief Executive Officer of EmPower Semiconductor.

There were two "in-person" only events included in the program.

The 'first in-person only" was a seminar on "Social Networking for Engineers" presented by Ada Cheng, a market consultant with AdaClock and Anagenesis, and sponsored by the PSMA Industry-Education committee and IEEE PELS. This session was open to and well received by students, young professionals and even seasoned professionals who registered for the workshop and attended the session to gain insights and guidance on making meaningful connections with others. See the separate article in this issue of the UPDATE for more information on this seminar.

The second in-person only event was the spirited and interactive 'Roadmap for Power Integration Discussion" co-moderated by Francesco Carobolante of IoTissimo and Hanh-Phuc Le of University of California at San Diego. The roadmap discussions will be fed back to technical roadmap activities of IEEE and PSMA regarding power integration.

The "Trends and Opportunities" discussion originally announced as in-person only was broadcast on-line so all workshop attendees could hear the dialogue of experts from markets analysis, venture capitalist, integrated device manufacturers, small start-up component manufacturers and semiconductor fab organizations regarding the market environment to further advance Power Supply on Chip technology.

All in all, the 2021 Power Supply on Chip workshop provided two and a half days of useful and focused dialogs that will continue to drive PwrSoC and PSiP technologies forward. We look forward to the next workshop of the Power Supply on Chip workshop series. Planning is in process for the next workshop to be held as an in-person workshop in Europe. It is evident from this workshop that roadmaps are in place product releases with roots in PwrSoC and PSiP are accelerating. The momentum and interest witnessed during this workshop will lead to an exciting in-person workshop in Europe.

General Chair:
Mark Allen  mallen@seas.upenn.edu

Technical Program Co-Chairs:
Matt Wilkowski mwilkowski@enachip.com
Hanh-Phuc Le hanhphuc@ucsd.edu

For more information about previous and coming PwrSoC events, visit http://pwrsocevents.com.

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