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It’s an experience we’ve all had: Whether catching up with a friend over dinner at a restaurant, meeting an interesting person at a cocktail party, or conducting a meeting amid office commotion, we find ourselves having to shout over background chatter and general noise. The human ear and brain are not especially good at identifying separate sources of sound in a noisy environment to focus on a particular conversation. This ability deteriorates further with general hearing loss, which is becoming more prevalent as people live longer, and can lead to social isolation.However, a team of researchers from the University of Washington, Microsoft

This is a sponsored article brought to you by Siemens.Layout versus schematic (LVS) comparison is a crucial step in integrated circuit (IC) design verification, ensuring that the physical layout of the circuit matches its schematic representation. The primary goal of LVS is to verify the correctness and functionality of the design. Traditionally, LVS comparison is performed during signoff verification, where dedicated tools compare layout and schematic data to identify any inconsistencies or errors. However, uncovering errors at the signoff stage leads to time-consuming iterations that delay design closure and time to market. While early-stage LVS comparison could miti

When your car breaks down, you take it to the mechanic. When a computer chip fails, engineers go to the failure analysis team. It’s their job to diagnose what went wrong and work to make sure it doesn’t in the future. The International Symposium on the Physical and Failure analysis of Integrated Circuits (IPFA) is a yearly conference in Asia attended by failure analysis engineers. The gathering is mostly technical, but there’s also a fun part: The Art of Failure Analysis contest.

Connecting every school to the Internet is a monumental challenge that until recently no one had dared to tackle—in part because not all countries can even pin down the location of all their schools. But a new joint initiative from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and UNICEF seeks to fill that gap. Dubbed Giga, the Geneva-based program has undertaken an ambitious mission to map and link up 6 million schools worldwide that are still offline by 2030. The program’s initial results include mapping one-third of the world’s sch

When I was eight years old, I won a coloring contest that earned me a free birthday party at my hometown Chuck E. Cheese. We don’t have any photos from the event because, as my mother recalls, it was absolute mayhem. Kids were running from room to room playing video games and Skee-Ball. The adults couldn’t corral anyone for pizza and cake. And then there was the show: The animatronic rat Charles “Entertainment” Cheese and the Pizza Time Players entertained—or terrified—attendees with their songs and corny banter. That may have been the last time I entered a Chuck E. Cheese pizzeria. And yet, when I heard that the company was phasing out the animatronic bands from all but five locations by the end of this year, I felt a twinge of nostalgia. M

In my columns throughout the year, I have shared my priorities for my presidency. These include the need for IEEE to increase its retention of younger members and to engage with industry. I also committed to working to increase the organization’s outreach to the broader public and to cultivating an environment that fosters the development of new products and services for our members and customers.These priorities served as the basis for my activities, as well as for the creation of our task forces and ad hoc committees for the year. I collaborated with colleagues and encouraged organizational units that are focused on these topics to take the lead in developing action plans that will guide us toward our go

At a time when we all carry smartphones that can stream high-definition movies into our hands, the romance of listening to old-school analog broadcast radio nevertheless endures. For some it’s a break from the cookies, contracts, and terms of service that lurk behind every online activity. For folks like me though, a big part of the charm is the thrill that comes from pulling in a signal from thousands of kilometers away—and doing it the time-honored way: with an understanding of atmospheric conditions, antennas, and electronics.This pastime of using varied knowledge and skills to pull in very distant stations is called DXing. Today, digital signal processing makes it possible to put stupendously capable re

Ruzena Bajcsy is one of the founders of the modern field of robotics. With an education in electrical engineering in Slovakia, followed by a Ph.D. at Stanford, Bajcsy was the first woman to join the engineering faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. She was the first, she says, because “in those days, nice girls didn’t mess around with screwdrivers.” Bajcsy, now 91, spoke with IEEE Spectrum at the 40th anniversary celebration of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Ruzena BajcsyRuzena Bajcsy’s 50-plus years in robotics sp

Shrikanth Narayanan has spent his entire career making speech and language processing technologies more accessible.The IEEE Fellow has developed machine intelligence and signal processing technologies to analyze human behavior including spoken language, facial expressions, and physiological indicators.Shrikanth Narayanan Employer: University of Southern California Title: Professor of electrical en

In 1970, Bill Harding envisioned a fully automated wafer-fabrication line that would produce integrated circuits in less than one day. Not only was such a goal gutsy 54 years ago, it would be bold even in today’s billion-dollar fabs, where the fabrication time of an advanced IC is measured in weeks, not days. Back then, ICs, such as random-access memory chips, were typically produced in a monthlong stop-and-go march through dozens of manual work stations. At the time, Harding was the manager of IBM’s Manufacturing Research group, in