Memory Design Workshop 2021 (MDW) 9th to 13th, August 2021 (VIRTUAL)

#Memory #Design #Workshop

Amidst these un-precedented COVID times, nobody was expecting a virtual workshop for memory design that could have practical session and demonstrate the ability to design best in class memory cells virtually. But IEEE CAS Bangalore Chapter took the challenge head-on by announcing in association with IEEE Bangalore Section “Memory Design Workshop (MDW) -2021”. The team not just succeeded but got an astounding response from Industry and Academia throughout the lecture and lab sessions. 

The event was comprised of 5 days of lectures,2 in a day from Industry maestros and esteemed academicians, followed by self-paced hands-on lab session spanning over 2 weeks.

Registration for the event started with an early bird discount of 50% discount for all registrations and as the registrations closed the team had around 190+ registrations.

Each day had an inaugural keynote followed by a technical session. Day one was special, so the proceeding started of with an auspicious lighting of the lamp by the dignitaries and the IEEE CAS Team.

The keynotes were delivered by IEEE veterans including the likes of IEEE Bangalore Section Chair - Mr. Bindhumadhav, Vice Chair IEEE India Council – Mr. Puneet Mishra, IEEE CASS President – Prof. Amara and IEEE CAS Vice President – Prof. Nishio.

One of the inaugural sessions became the most memorable as Prof. Nishio announced and awarded the IEEE CAS Bangalore Chapter with “IEEE CAS Society 2021 - Chapter of the Year Award” making it the “Best CASS Chapter out of 121 chapters”.

The topics of the lecture for the memory design workshop was centred around how design enthusiasts can make the best-in-class memory cells. The technical introduction was with all the different types of memories which was delineated by Mr. Krishnan who covered from every memory type and its applications and it was a perfect setting of stage for the topics to come over the entire week. Following days were in depth understanding of the advanced subject of STT-RAM by industry greats like Mr. Siddharth Gupta of ARM and Mr. Siva Kumar of Global Foundaries. There were sessions which explained about the Yield analysis of SRAM and math behind every Yield engineers mind. Then was the most interesting of all, the use memory in Neuro Morphic Computing by Prof. Durga Mishra of New Jersey Institute of Technology and In-Memory Compute by Prof. Manan Suri of Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. We switched gears now to know the overview of LPDDR4 and Embedded Non-Volatile memories which was delivered by Mr. Venkat Bringi of Micron and Mr. Devraj of Texas Instruments, respectively. To sign-off the event, we had to understand how we test and keep the security aspect in this highly illicit society, so we had Mr. Ashish Kumar of ST-Microelectronics brief about memory applications in security followed by Mr. Sanjith Sleeba of Nvidia, who explained MBIST a mechanism for memory test.

All the sessions were highly applauded by the virtual audience who throughout the week was interactive and involved.

Each technical lecture session had minimum of 100 attendees and a max for 143 was seen with lectures spanning between 60 & 120 minutes.