The Green IC Group

Welcome to our homepage! We hope you will enjoy the contents and find it interesting.
The group is led by Prof. Massimo Alioto, and involves amazing people who are passionate about integrated circuit technology and its impact on the life of (many) people. Energy efficiency is the focal point of our activity, as its improvement can bring large benefits to our environment and drive the evolution of everyday electronic objects through their form factor, battery life and enhanced capabilities (e.g., mobile systems, wearables, smart objects, Internet of Things).
 
Below there is a short description of our interests, location, vision and mission. Please, contact Prof. Massimo Alioto for further information. Our press releases and the impact of our research on worldwide media are summarized in the Press page. We also like sharing our vision and sense of perspective over a number of public events and publications, as summarized under “Sharing thoughts, publicly“).
Feel free to explore our short videos and experimental demonstrations on several new technologies that are being developed in our group: our research and its impact on the world in a nutshell. Some of our chips are showcased in the chip gallery.
Hope you will enjoy!

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Prof. Massimo Alioto

Massimo Alioto was born in Brescia in 1972. He took the M.Sc. degree in Electronic Engineering in 1997, and the Ph.D. degree in 2001 from the University of Catania. He is currently Professor at the ECE department...read more

About Green IC

Mission

Our value proposition can be summarized as follows: improve the quality of life in our society and reduce our environmental impact by introducing innovative integrated circuit solutions with dramatically improved energy efficiency, reduced form factor, extended lifetime and lower cost…read more

Vision

Energy efficiency is the common denominator in the challenges of improving quality of life and reducing environmental impact through the diffusion of low-cost electronic systems whose usage does not interfere with their surroundings (spatially thanks to their extreme compactness)…read more

What

The Green IC group aims to develop cutting-edge research on extremely energy-efficient integrated circuits for high-performance, mobile and ubiquitous micro and nano systems. The group focuses on the following fundamental energy-centric research thrusts that cover the entire range…read more

Where

The Green IC group is part of the ECE department of the National University of Singapore (NUS), a leading global university centered in Asia. According to QS World University Rankings 2025, NUS is ranked first in Asia, and 8th in the world….read more

Sharing thoughts, publicly

As an attempt to link the above principles with promising circuit design directions, you might be interested in checking the following overviews / webinars / editorials by Prof. Alioto:

–  overview on the state of the art and the future of battery-light and battery-less integrated systems for trillion-scale systems (e.g., IoT) in an invited paper on IEEE Design&Test

–  IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society webinar on our work on circuits and architectures for ultra-wide power-performance adaptation well beyond voltage scaling (Dec 2020)

–  our IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine (Aug 2019) presents a fresh overview in the field of hardware security, a quantitative analysis of on-going trends, and describes new promising directions

– our ISSCC tutorial on hardware security (Feb 2019), surveying its state of the art in a short 90 minutes (check out the IEEE SSC website, where it will be posted soon)

–  our IEEE JETCAS overview paper on energy-quality scalable systems (Dec 2018) presents a reasoned analysis of the recent advances in the related fields, and describes the open challenges and the available opportunities for the decade to come

– editorial on IEEE JETCAS special issue on energy-quality scalable circuits and systems (co-guest edited with Dr. Vivek De and Dr. Andrea Marongiu), taking stock of the advances in this exciting research area that we are exploring in several directions. The overwhelming number of submissions has led to an unprecedented two-volume special issue (Sept 2018, Dec 2018)

– YouTube video with our talk on pervasive/continuous hardware security at RISE Spring School (University of Cambridge, 28 March 2018)

– editorial on IEEE TCAS-I special issue on IoT (along with Prof. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli and Prof. Sanchez-Sinencio) presenting our vision on the IoT and insights into historical  trends

– invited IEEE CEM paper describing the state of the art of sensor nodes for the IoT, the limitations and the trends in the foreseeable future

– invited DATE 2017 paper presenting our vision on energy-quality scalable circuits and systems for the next 10X energy reduction

– IEEE TCAS-II Editorial for the special issue on “Ultra-Low Voltage VLSI Circuits and Systems for Green Computing”

– IEEE TCAS-I overview paper opening the 2012 Editorial Year

– HotChips invited talk summarizing the vision of Prof. Alioto and the challenges related to the Internet of Things (2014)

– ISCAS 2015 panel discussion on CAD Tools for Circuits and Systems, where Prof. Alioto shares his vision on how CAD tools will evolve in the next decade.