TCNCAS Meeting Minutes

ISCAS 96: Atlanta, GA, May 14, 1996:

AGENDA:

• Reports on past conferences and organized special sessions:
  • ISCAS'95: 80 papers submitted for the nonlinear sessions, with two special sessions.
  • ISCAS'96: 12 papers and 42 posters accepted.
  • NDES'95: It was the 3rd workshop (after Dresden'93, Krakow'94). There were 88 submissions, 63 accepted. It was attended by 90 participants, 23 from Central Europe.
  • NOLTA'95: A special issue of the IEICE transactions will be devoted to the conference.
  • Other events:
  • Special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society London A, 16 October 1995, on ``Chaos in Electronic Circuits,'' edited by L. O. Chua and J. M. T. Thompson.
  • Part Special Issue of The International Journal of Electronics vol. 79, No. 6, December 1995, on ``Nonlinear Dynamics of Electronic Systems'', edited by M. J. Ogorzalek.

• Organization of network services, mailing lists, WWW pages, links to IEEE home pages.

• NOLTA'96 - Kochi, Japan, October 7 - 9, 1996.

• Special sessions for ISCAS'97, Hong Kong, June 9 - 12, 1997.
  Larger participation of the IEEE Technical Committee (TC) members in organizing special sessions and the review process. The current VP of the Technical Committees Chris Toumazou is taking an active role in coordinating the technical activities.

• NDES'97 will be held in Moscow, Russia, 26 - 27 June, 1997.

• ECCTD'97 will be held in Budapest, Hungary, 30 August - 3 September, 1997.

• NOLTA'97 will be held in Hilton Hawaiian Village, Hawaii, November 29 - December 3, 1997.

• Cooperation with the IEICE Technical Group on Nonlinear Problems:
  Ideas were sought for possible collaboration with the IEICE society.

• Issues already proposed but still remaining undeveloped:
  (1) Undergraduate competition in nonlinear circuit design
  (2) Unsolved important problems in Nonlinear Circuits and Systems Theory:
  Mike Green's list was presented for discussion and suggestions:
  • Find an upper bound, using physically realizable transistor models, on the maximum number of operating points of a circuit that contains positive-valued resistors, diodes, independent sources and n transistors for any positive integer n. A method to construct a circuit that possesses this maximum number of operating points, for any n, must be given.
  • Find criteria that identify the stability of any dc operating point of a nonlinear circuit.
  • Construct a homotopy that will thread through every dc operating point of any physically realizable nonlinear circuit.

• IEEE Transactions on CAS, Part II
  Special issue on ``Advances in nonlinear electronic circuits''
  Guest editors: M. P. Kennedy and A. Rodriguez-Vazquez
• Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing:
  Special issue on ``DC operating points of electrical circuits''
  Guest editor: Lj. Trajkovic
• IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, Part I:
  Special issue on ``Chaos synchronization, control and applications''
  Guest editors: M. P. Kennedy and M. J. Ogorzalek.

• Introducing Electronic Letters as another IEEE Publication was received with mixed comments. Several members felt that introducing a new journal would be yet another bifurcation of the original IEEE Transactions on CAS. After having Part I and Part II, it was felt that another IEEE journal would make the CAS Transactions even slimmer. A. N. Willson added that, after all, engineering is ``theory and practice'', rather than ``theory'' or ``practice''.