The second contributor, Steve, Kang, Head of the Electrical And Computer Engineering Department at the University of Illinois, sends to ECS his warm salutations and wishes for a fruitful and influential future in another excellent article.

Finally , the Newsletter ends with forthcoming conference, lecture, workshop announcments communicated by Patrick Dewilde, and some ISCAS'97 statistics showing European participation.

Thank you Joos, Steve, and Patrick for your time and effort.

[1] Munson, D. C., Jr. /Elements of a new electrical engineering curricullum at Illinois: a shift from circuits to signal processing/, Proc. ISCAS 1995, pp. 157-457, Seattle, Washington, USA, April/30-May/5, 1995.

[2] Dertouzos, M. L., et al. /Systems, Networks and Computation: Basic Concepts/ McGraw-Hill, 1972.

ECS AND SIGNAL PROCESSING

by Joos Vandewalle Joos.vandewalle@esat.kuleuven.ac.be

Over the past two years I had several interesting discussions about the relationship between our ECS society and signal processing. This justifies the need for an open and constructive exchange of ideas with our members and with other interested parties. In the present contribution I want to bring forward a number of observations, opinions, ideas and proposals which resulted from these discussions. The ECS Council looks forward to your reactions.

Related to the role, the position and evolution of circuit theory and design in education, research and industry, sometimes people make a number of pessimistic observations. For example in an effort to rationalize electrical engineering curriculum some universities, go as far as disassembling the basic course on circuit theory and appending the debris to courses like circuit design and signal processing. Others reverse the traditional order of having first circuit theory and then digital signal processing. For both re-organizations it is argued that circuit theory is too abstract and theoretical that students should better start with design and only do circuit analysis and theory when it is needed for the design (the just in time approach) (see paper of R. Rohrer). This leads to limited insight in rather basic circuit theory concepts like Kirchoff's laws, Tellegen's Theorem, Thevenin-Norton equivalents, two port parameters, energy and passivity concepts, graph theory, network analysis, ... In research and industry there are often similar attitudes of minimizing the role of circuit theory. Yet this brings me to a first statement that recent evolutions in electrical engineering (VLSI, computer aided design, telecommunication, neural network, power electricity) have in no way reduced the role of circuit theory. Of course we should always be prepared to bring out the circuit theory concepts and methods in an attractive and up-to-date format. It is clear that electrical engineers should have a solid understanding on the relationship between classes of circuits, their mathematical descriptions and their corresponding behavior and limitations. Although the analysis and design of circuits can and should use computer support, such circuit theory insight is essential in order to avoid blind faith in computer results and simulation. Moreover, circuit theory concepts are essential for hardware implementation of many modern electronic systems such as digital and analog chips, telecommunication circuits (low power for wireless communication), analog and digital signal processing (just think about the wave digital filters), biomedical electronics, power electronics, computers. Clearly, there is an evolution towards more and more software but eventually the information processing is done on electronic hardware using currents and voltages. Hence we should be prepared to accept that electrical circuits and the theory describing it continues to play an important role in order to design and build electronic systems. Moreover, the circuit concepts can even provide useful paradigms for other fields such as artificial neural network models for biological systems or lossless filters for wave digital filters.

With this view in mind we look forward to build ECS as the European society which promotes research activities and exchange of ideas. Within this broad scope there is an evident overlap with other societies like EURASIP (European Society for Signal Processing). Of course there is no need to avoid this overlap or open an exclusivity debate about it. Rather it should encourage us to combine efforts and stimulate interactions. This has happened already in the past by avoiding a collapse in time between the main conference ECCTD for ECS and EUSIPCO for EURASIP, which are organized bi-annually respectively on the odd and even years. Clearly, here is room for many more interactions at the level of journals, joint memberships and eventually a platform for European Electrical Engineers. In fact the appropriate role model could or should be that of IEEE where we have the circuits and systems society and the signal processing society, which both flourish with a large amount of independence under the IEEE umbrella.

In fact, the bottom line of most discussions, I had, was precisely that we should stimulate such interactions in order to ensure the long term viability of our ECS society.

I look forward to your reactions on this topic and will report about it in future newsletters.

R. Rohrer, "Taking circuits seriously," IEEE Circuits and Devices, July 1990, pp. 27-31.

MY SALUTE TO ECS

by Steve Kang (University of Illinois at Urbana Chamaaign)

First my congratulations to many colleagues in Europe on the formation of ECS with ECCTD as its flagship conference and IJCTA as its official journal. This alliance will consolidate and promote many excellent technical activities in Europe. According to the membership survey conducted several years ago by IEEE, members appreciate most the technical activities in journal publication and technical conferences. Thus, the targetted role of ECS will be very helpful to circuits community not only in Europe but also in other parts of the world.

Up to now IEEE has played an important role to many electrical and electronic engineers around the globe. Thus, one may wonder about the relationship of ECS to IEEE CAS. In my opinion, the birth of ECS would not make IEEE CAS activities any less relevant to ECS members as long as two societies communicate and seek cooperation. The annual meeting of IEEE Region 8 CAS chapter chairs at the ISCAS site has been one of the ISCAS highlights to me. This infrastructure can be helpful to ECS in forging stronger technical interactions in Europe and worldwide.

Personally I had realized the origins of basic circuit-theoretic laws in Europe longtime ago, to mention a few, Kirchoff's, Ohm's, and Tellegen's. One of my favorite professors at Berkeley, Charles Desoer, is also from Belgium. Turning my eyes into Region 10, I also notice the strong alliance of circuits professionals in the Asia-Pacific region. The Asia Pacific Conference on Circuits and Systems (APCCAS) has been held biennially first in Sydney, Australia, then in Taiwan, and this year it will be held in Seoul, Korea. While there is no counterpart of IJCTA in the Asia- Pacific region, both IEEE CAS Transactions and IJCTA can fill the needs of international journals beyond national journals.

As for the future roles of circuit theory, the scope of the so-called has changed a lot over the last few decades, especially with the invention of integrated circuits. Systems, in essence, have landed in integrated circuits and changes have been very rapid, modestly put. It has changed the significance of "passivity" which was deemed so critical when I took circuit theory courses. In fact, resistors (supposedly passive) are often implemented with transistors (active) in such circuits as photoreceivers. On the other hand, many well established circuit theorems and knowledges are continually applied to many different science and engineering problems. One example is the role of Elmore's time constant in the analysis of propagation delays in modern integrated circuits.

Well-informed circuit theoreticians can prevent the reinventing of wheels and help solve seemingly new problems with established circuit techniques under proper mapping. Also, seemingly irrelevant new circuit theories can play important roles someday in the future. May the respect for elegant circuit theory as well as the respect for addressing practical problems in a timely manner coexist harmoniously in ECS. I look forward to watching the growth and influence of ECS not only in Europe, but also worldwide.

FORTHCOMING CONFERENCES by Patrick Dewilde

7th ANNUAL WORKSHOP ON CIRCUITS, SYSTEMS AND SIGNAL PROCESSING .Mierlo, the Netherlands, November 27-30.

Aside from open sessions and posters, there will be special lectures on the following topics:

Analog Design - Image Processing - HW/SW codesign - Speech Processing - Algorithmic Design - Advanced Devices

Information on the Workshop: J.P. Veen, STW, P.O. Box 3021, 3502GA Utrecht, The Netherlands;
email: prorisc@stw.nl,
www: http://www.stw.nl/prorisc

CALL FOR PAPERS: EUROPEAN DESIGN & TEST CONFERENCE 1997 .

EDAC The European Conf. on Design Automation; ETC European Test Conf.; ASIC Exhibition Paris, France, March 17-20, 1997

SUBMIT CONTRIBUTION ON or BEFORE SEPT, 6 1996

Sponsored by: European Design and Automation Association, IEEE Computer Society, ACM SIG-DA. .sp .5

The annual EUROPEAN DESIGN & TEST CONFERENCE has established itself as a forum of excellence for presentations of outstanding industrial and academic technical work on all aspects of research and development of technology for the design and test of electronics-based products. In 1996 the Conference had 396 paper submissions from which international reviewers selected 107 high-quality papers for presentation. This number of submissions has made the Conference the largest event within its scope, being attended by more than 500 attendees from all over the world.

An international team of 100 reviewers will select the best papers for presentation at the conference and publication in the proceedings.

ED&TC 97 Conf. Secretariat: CEP Consultants Ltd., 43 Manor Place, Edinburgh, EH3 7EB, UK edtc@cep.u-net.com, tel: +44 131 300 3300, fax: +44 131 300 3400 Programme Chair: Hugo De Man, IMEC, Kapeldreef 75, B3001 Leuven, Belgium deman@imec.be; Tel: +32 16 28 12 01; Fax: +32 16 28 15 15

FOR INFORMATION ON THE 13 CONFERENCE TOPICS AND THE LATEST NEWS SEE WWW PAGE OF ED&TC 97

http://www.imec.be/edtc/97/
http://www.imec.be/edtc
http://www.imec.be

ABOUT ISCAS 1996

The most important event of the year for the Circuits and Systems community was with no doubt ISCAS'96 held in Atlanta, Georgia between the dates May 12-15. The Symposium was very well organised in the 120.000 square feet wide meeting rooms of the Atlanta Marriott Marquis Hotel where the ICASSP'96 had taken place the previous week (May 7-11).

The Conference Program consisting of 10 Tutorials, the Keynote Address, 8 Panel Sessions, 72 Regular Sessions organised in 8 tracks and 10 Poster Sessions was satiating. The titles of the tracks were:

1- Analog Signal Processing 2- Digital Signal Processing 3- Visual Signal Processing 4- Nonlinear Circuits & Systems 5- Power Circuits & Systems 6- VLSI Systems & Applications 7- Neural Systems & Applications 8- Computer Aided Design .

Our thanks are due to J. Alvin Connelly (Vice Chairman) and Clinton Knight for providing the following figures. TOTAL ATTENDANCE FROM ISCAS DATABASE: 945 TOTAL EUROPEAN ATTENDANCE: 224

43 UK, 26 Germany, 24 Italy, 17 Switzerland, 16 Spain, 14 Finland, 13 Netherlands, 12 France, 11 Portugal, 8 Sweeden, 6 Poland, 6 Norway, 5 Austria, 5 Denmark, 5 Greece, 2 Iceland, 2 Belgium, 2 Slovenia, 2 Turkey, 1 Israel, 1 Romania, 1 Czech Republic, 1 Estonia, 1 Hungary.