Sung-Mo “Steve” Kang

Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Research Professor

University of California, Santa Cruz

Abstract:

For over a half century, the semiconductor industry has made phenomenal progresses to benefit our daily life, as in the mobile communication from anywhere to everywhere, virtual meetings and remote learning under the pandemic, entertainment, autonomous cars, energy-efficient lighting, extensive machine learning, and AI applications as in health diagnosis. The semiconductor chips have been a driving force- today the most advanced wafer-scale AI chip contains more than one trillion transistors. In this talk, we will discuss CMOS VLSI and consider memristor circuits and systems for ultra-dense and low-power integration. The basics of memristor technology and applications of memristors for neuromorphic computing and machine learning hardware acceleration will be discussed.

Sung-Mo “Steve” Kang is a Distinguished Chair Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor of the Baskin School of Engineering, UC Santa Cruz. He has published over 500 journal and conference papers, over 10 books, and holds 16 patents. Prior to returning to academia in 1985, he led the development of world’s premier fully-CMOS 32-bit VLSI microprocessor chipsets for telecommunication and computing applications as a technical supervisor of AT&T Bell laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey.

He has received honors include the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame Induction, Alexander von Humboldt Senior US Scientists Award, IEEE Millennium Medal, IEEE Mac Van Valkenburg Circuits and Systems (CAS) Society Award, IEEE CAS Society Technical Excellence Award, the US Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) Technical Excellence Award, IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Graduate Teaching Technical Field Award, IEEE CAS Society John Choma Education Award, Chang-Lin Tien Education Leadership Award. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1975.

Dr. Kang is a Life Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a Life Member of the Korean Academy of Science and Technology and a Foreign Member of the National Academy of Engineering, Korea. His current research interest includes memristors and memristive systems, low-power VLSI circuit design, and neuromorphic computing.