Marconi Society 2012 Symposium to Explore “Technologies and Applications Driving the Future of Communications”

The Marconi Society will host its 2012 Symposium, "Technologies and Applications Driving the Future of Communications," on Thursday, September 6, 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Beckman Center at UC Irvine. The annual event honors the Marconi Prize winner and features top thought leaders in information and communication science. The 2012 recipient is Dr. Henry Samueli, Co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Technical Officer of Broadcom Corporation (see related announcement). The Symposium is open to the public – register at MarconiSociety.org.

The Symposium includes two sessions. Session One covers the direction and progress of technologies that underlie telecommunications and the Internet. Moderated by Eli Yablonovitch, Director of the NSF Center for Energy Efficient Electronics Science (E³S) at UC Berkeley, the session will include presentations from Federico Faggin, designer of the world’s first microprocessor; Frank Chang, Department Chair and Wintek Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering, UCLA; and presentations by Yablonovitch and Samueli.

Topics to be presented in this session include strategies to facilitate continued growth in complexity and performance of integrated circuits; technical options for improving the energy efficiency of information processing; the promise and potential of terahertz systems; and how future generations of increasingly complex CMOS (complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor) chips will evolve in the era of sub-10nm devices.

“In many ways it all comes back to Moore’s Law,” says Samueli. “It’s been with us for nearly 50 years, and despite the fact that Moore’s Law will eventually run into fundamental physical scaling limits, there are many generations of CMOS process technology advances that can still be realized. This session will help illustrate both the historical trends in information processing and communications semiconductor design and what the future may bring as we approach those limits—or leap over them.”

Session Two, moderated by Robert Lucky, former Executive Director, Communications Sciences Research Division of Bell Labs and Chairman Emeritus of the Marconi Society, will include talks from UCLA Professor Leonard Kleinrock, often referred to as one of the “Fathers of the Internet;” Vint Cerf, Google Vice President & Chief Internet Evangelist and co-inventor of TCP/IP Protocol; Paulraj Arogyaswami, Stanford Professor Emeritus and a senior advisor to Broadcom; and Professor Larry Smarr, Founding Director, Calit2 (California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology, UC San Diego/UC Irvine).

Speakers will discuss the pervasiveness of wireless communications and the Internet and how applications ranging from medical to social networking are shaping our lives—as well as how technology is evolving to meet the ever growing demand for wireless capacity.

“Cyberspace is now moving out from behind the computer screen in which it has been trapped and is appearing in our physical spaces,” says Kleinrock. “The explosion of small intelligent devices embedded in the physical world and connected to the Internet (combined with software agents whose function is to mine data, act on that data, observe trends, carry out tasks dynamically and adapt to their environment), is exponentially driving the generation of network traffic—even without taking into consideration the growing traffic directly generated by humans. It’s going to be challenging—and fascinating—to see how technology rises to the capacity challenge.”

The 2012 Marconi Society Symposium is chaired by Nicolaos G. Alexopoulos, Vice President, Antenna & Radio Frequency Research and University Relations at Broadcom. General admission tickets, which include a lunch following the program, are $50. Discounts are available for students and UC faculty with proper I.D. For more information and to register, go to http://marconisociety.org/events.html#.

About the Marconi Society

The Marconi Society was established in 1974 by Gioia Marconi Braga, daughter of Guglielmo Marconi, the Nobel laureate who invented radio (wireless telegraphy). It is best known for the Marconi Prize, awarded annually to an outstanding individual/s whose scope of work and influence emulate the principle of “creativity in service to humanity” that inspired Marconi. Through symposia, conferences, forums and publications, the Marconi Society promotes awareness of major innovations in communication theory, technology and applications with particular attention to understanding how they change and benefit society. Additional information about the Marconi Society and the Marconi Fellows can be found at

www.marconisociety.org.