International Solid State Circuits Conference

International Solid-State Circuits Conference is a global forum for presentation of advances in solid-state circuits and Systems-on-a-Chip. The Conference offers a unique opportunity for engineers working at the cutting edge of IC design to maintain technical currency, and to network with leading experts. It is held every year in February at the San Francisco Marriott hotel in downtown San Francisco. ISSCC is sponsored by IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society.

According to The Register, "The ISSCC event is the second event of each new year, following the Consumer Electronics Show, where new PC processors and sundry other computing gadgets are brought to market."

Early participants in the inaugural conference in 1954 belonged to the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) Circuit Theory Group and the IRE subcommittee of Transistor Circuits. The conference was held in Philadelphia and local chapters of IRE and American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) were in attendance. Later on AIEE and IRE would merge to become the present-day IEEE.

The first conference consisted of papers from six organizations: Bell Telephone Laboratories, General Electric, RCA, Philco, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania. The registration was $4 (early registration was $3) and 601 people registered. International attendees arrived from Canada, England and Japan. With subsequent conferences came many more international participants with the first international presentation in 1958. By 1965, the number of overseas program committee members increased to 8 and in 1970 the overseas members began meeting separately in both Europe and Japan. Selected members of these regional program committees would attend the final program meeting in America.

The name of the 1954 Conference appears in various publications and documents as: "The Transistor Conference", "The Conference on Transistor Circuits", "The Philadelphia Conference", or "The National Conference on Transistor Circuits". The current name "International Solid-State Circuits Conference" was settled by the organizers in 1960.

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Wikipedia