Special Sessions

Title: RISC-V and Open hardware: research, training and innovation towards Open-source Hw/Sw IP Infrastructure development 

Special Session Organizers: 

Francesc Moll, (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain) 

Lluís Terés (IMB-CNM , CSIC, Spain) 

Summary

The RISC-V ISA was born in 2010 at UC Berkeley aiming, not just to create a new RISC machine, but an open, advanced, refined and modular instruction set to address the open hardware challenges from the point of view of processor-based developments. RISC-V International came up to guide the open ISA standard independent evolution, and right now thousands of worldwide members from industry and academia are part of the RISC-V ecosystem and many hardware implementations of RISC-V ISA have been made available as open source code ready for its physical materialization either in FPGA or in SoC, as well as components at chip level ready for systems development. The EU Chips Act is betting on open architectures such as RISC-V for its future processors and clearly proposes the EU Design Platform strategy based on open tools, PDKs and IP catalogues.

In the last editions of the DCIS conference there has been a special session devoted to RISC-V and open hardware. This year the special session title remains on its fundamental topic “RISC-V and Open hardware: research, training and innovation …”, but is devoted to “… towards Open-source Hw/Sw IP Infrastructure development” and not only devoted to RISC-V, but addressing any kind of hardware, digital and analogue, aiming to become open. Thus, in this session we aim to open the discussions around all these topics while trying to share results and contribute to European goals and targets. In this sense, we expect contributions on any related topic to have the right picture of the research community in this domain.

Red-RISCV Spanish research network and SOHA (Spanish Open Hardware Association) are contributing to organize this special session. 

Title: Gallium Nitride Circuits, Systems and Applications 

Special Session Organizer: 

Salvatore Pennisi (University of Catania, Italy) 

Summary

GaN offers superior performance compared to traditional materials in terms of power density, efficiency, and frequency operation. This special session welcomes original and unpublished contributions that explore the design, development, and applications of GaN-based circuits and systems.

Topics of Interest:

GaN power electronics: high-voltage GaN devices, integrated GaN power converters, GaN-based motor drives, wide bandgap power supplies, galvanic isolation;

GaN radio frequency (RF) and microwave circuits: GaN RF transistors, high-power amplifiers, millimeter-wave circuits, integrated voltage-controlled oscillators (VCOs);

GaN integrated circuits (ICs): monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs), GaN-on-Si integration, GaN-on- insulator (GaN-on-SOI) technology;

GaN-based system design: GaN for radar and communication systems, GaN for solid-state power conversion, GaN for high-performance computing;

Modeling, simulation, and characterization of GaN devices and circuits;

Reliability, thermal management, and packaging of GaN circuits and systems;

Applications of GaN circuits and systems in various industries (e.g., automotive, aerospace, power electronics, defense).

This special session is supported by GaN4AP project (Gallium Nitride for Advanced Power Applications).The project receives funding from the Electronic Component Systems for European Leadership Joint Undertaking (ECSEL_JU), under grant agreement No.101007310.This Joint Undertaking receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, and Italy, Germany, France, Poland, Czech Republic, Netherlands.