Asia Pacific Conference on Postgraduate Research in Microelectronics and Electronics

About Asia Pacific Conference on Postgraduate Research in Microelectronics and Electronics

Overview

The Asia Pacific Conference on Postgraduate Research in Microelectronics and Electronics (PrimeAsia) is a distinctive international conference with a specific mission: to give postgraduate students — Master's and PhD candidates — a professional stage on which to present their research, benchmark it against their peers, and connect with the wider scientific and industrial community. An initiative of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (IEEE CASS) and sponsored by the IEEE and IEEE CASS, PrimeAsia is recorded as a continuing proceedings publication with ISSNs 2159-2144 (print) and 2159-2160 (electronic).

Most conferences welcome student papers; few are built around students. PrimeAsia inverts the usual hierarchy. The presenters are postgraduates, many giving one of their first international conference talks; the audience mixes fellow students with the established scientists and engineers — from universities, research institutes, and industry — who attend to scout talent, spot emerging directions, and mentor. The format is deliberately friendly and cooperative rather than combative: the point is to give early-career researchers visibility and constructive feedback at the stage when both matter most.

A signature feature of the conference is its Leaf Certificate awards. Based on the merit of the technical contribution and the quality of the paper and presentation, the top 10% of student presentations receive Gold Leaf Certificates, the next 10–20% Silver, and the following 20–30% Bronze. For a postgraduate student, a Gold Leaf from an IEEE CASS conference is a concrete, citable distinction — the kind of early recognition that strengthens a CV, a thesis defense, and a job or postdoc application.

PrimeAsia is closely associated with its sister conference, the IEEE Asia Pacific Conference on Circuits and Systems (APCCAS) — the premier regional circuits-and-systems conference of IEEE CASS — and recent editions have been co-located with it, letting student presenters attend the main conference's keynotes, sessions, and exhibitions as well. The 2022 edition met in Shenzhen, China (27–30 October 2022, at the Hilton Shenzhen Shekou Nanhai Hotel) alongside APCCAS 2022; the 2025 edition was held with APCCAS 2025 at the Paradise Hotel in Busan, South Korea (12–15 October 2025); the 2026 edition is scheduled for Fukuoka, Japan (25–28 October 2026, at ACROS Fukuoka); and a 2027 edition is already announced. Earlier editions include Hyderabad, India in December 2012 and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in November 2017 — the latter themed "Advancing Circuits and Systems Innovation for Connected World" — showing the conference's steady rotation across the Asia-Pacific region.

The proceedings collect the peer-reviewed papers presented at each edition, forming a record of what the region's postgraduate researchers are actually working on — a leading indicator of where microelectronics research is heading, written by the people who will shape its next decade.

Aims and Scope

PrimeAsia covers the wide spectrum of microelectronics and electronics research, with emphasis on circuits and systems. The call-for-papers topics of recent editions include, but are not limited to:

Analog and mixed-signal circuits and systems. Data converters, amplifiers, filters, phase-locked loops, and the mixed-signal interfaces that connect the digital world to physical signals.

Digital integrated circuits and systems. Digital design methodologies, low-power digital techniques, hardware accelerators, and digital signal processing implementations.

Communications circuits and systems. RF and millimetre-wave circuits, transceivers, and the circuit-level enablers of wired and wireless communication.

Sensory circuits and systems. Image sensors, readout circuits, sensor interfaces, and lab-on-a-chip systems that bring sensing and processing together.

Biomedical circuits and systems. Implantable and wearable electronics, neural interfaces, biosignal processing — a strong student-research area, as illustrated by plenary topics at past editions such as microelectronics-based implantable devices for biomedical applications.

Power and energy circuits and systems. Power management ICs, energy harvesting, power converters, and circuits for energy-efficient systems.

Artificial intelligence circuits, systems, and applications. Neuromorphic computing, AI accelerators, and in-memory computing — among the fastest-growing topics in recent editions.

Beyond-CMOS: nanoelectronics and hybrid systems. Emerging devices and the heterogeneous integration of novel technologies with conventional CMOS.

Because the presenters are postgraduates, the proceedings have a characteristic profile: many papers report thesis-chapter-level work — a new circuit technique with measured silicon results, a novel architecture with FPGA or simulation validation, a careful comparative study. Reviewers evaluate them with appropriate expectations: technical correctness, honest reporting of results, and clarity of contribution matter more than the sweeping claims sometimes found in senior-authored papers.

Publication Details

The proceedings are identified by ISSN 2159-2144 for the print record and 2159-2160 for the electronic record — the standard IEEE conference-record ISSN pair. Papers from IEEE-sponsored editions are published by the IEEE and made available through IEEE Xplore, the standard discovery and citation platform for the field, with DOIs assigned to individual papers. (The 2012 Hyderabad edition, for example, was issued under IEEE catalog number CFP1244H-PRT with ISBN 978-1-4673-5065-5.)

Papers are published in English and are peer-reviewed: submissions are evaluated by technical program committee members and reviewers for technical merit, originality, and presentation quality before acceptance. The conference operates on an annual-to-biennial rhythm in step with its co-located editions, so proceedings volumes appear with each edition rather than on a journal schedule.

There is no journal-style impact factor for the proceedings — impact factors are not assigned to conference proceedings — and no open-access-journal article processing charge; authors register for the conference through the edition's registration process. Student authors should check each edition's announcements for any student registration rates or travel support, which student-focused conferences commonly provide.

Editorial and Review Process

Each edition is steered by an organizing committee drawn from the host region's universities and IEEE CASS volunteers — general chairs, technical program chairs, and track organizers. (The 2025 Busan edition, for instance, was led by General Chair Kyung Ki Kim of Daegu University, with co-chairs from Seoul National University and Ajou University among others.) The committee issues the call for papers, manages peer review through systems such as EasyChair, and assembles the technical program.

Submissions are full papers prepared to the IEEE conference template. Each paper is reviewed by specialists in its topic area, who assess technical correctness, the adequacy of the evidence (measured results from fabricated chips, FPGA prototypes, or thorough simulations, as appropriate), originality relative to prior work, and clarity of writing and presentation. The Leaf Certificate judging adds a further dimension: presentation quality at the conference itself counts, so authors are evaluated not only on what they wrote but on how they communicate it — a deliberate piece of professional training.

Accepted papers are presented in oral or poster sessions and published in the proceedings. For many student authors, the review feedback from PrimeAsia is among the first professional peer review they receive, and the revision process is itself part of the conference's educational mission.

Indexing and Abstracting

IEEE conference proceedings are routinely indexed in the major engineering databases, and PrimeAsia papers are discoverable through IEEE Xplore with assigned DOIs — the primary route by which the community finds and cites them. Coverage in curated citation indexes (Scopus, Web of Science's Conference Proceedings Citation Index) is typically evaluated per edition, so authors with institutional indexing requirements should verify the specific edition: search the paper title in IEEE Xplore and in the index in question, and confirm with a librarian for the exact volume.

For citation, include authors, paper title, the full conference name and edition/year, venue and dates, publisher (IEEE), the proceedings ISSNs (2159-2144 print, 2159-2160 electronic), and the paper's DOI. Complete citations ensure correct attribution in databases and in downstream citation counts.

Citation and Bibliometric Profile

Directory data derived from SCImago associates the series with an H-index of 12 — the highest among the proceedings profiled in this batch — reflecting a solid base of cited papers. As always with proceedings, this should be read as background context dependent on database and edition coverage, not as a precise ranking.

The more meaningful bibliometric story of PrimeAsia is demographic: its authors are postgraduates, and its papers are often the first publications of researchers who go on to substantial careers. Citations to PrimeAsia papers thus trace the early work of the region's emerging talent. For literature reviews in circuits and systems, the proceedings are worth searching precisely because they surface ideas at an early stage — techniques that later appear in journal form often debut here, and the student-authors' theses frequently contain extended treatments that repay a deeper look.

Participating and Submitting: A Guide for Postgraduate Authors

PrimeAsia is designed for first-time and early-career conference authors, but "student-friendly" does not mean "easy." Practical guidance:

Start from your thesis work. The strongest PrimeAsia papers are distilled thesis chapters: one clear contribution, with the evidence to back it. Do not try to compress your entire thesis into six pages; extract the result that stands alone.

Respect the IEEE template and page limits. Formatting compliance is checked and non-compliant papers can be returned. Figures must be legible at proceedings scale — a common first-timer mistake is unreadable plots and schematics.

Report results honestly and completely. Measured silicon results beat simulation where you have them; where you have simulation, say so clearly and describe the models and corners. Reviewers in circuits research check for the standard comparisons (prior art, figures of merit) and notice their absence.

Write the introduction for a broad circuits audience. Your reviewer may not work in your exact sub-area. Motivate the problem, position against prior work fairly, and state the contribution in one paragraph that a non-specialist can understand.

Prepare the presentation as seriously as the paper. Leaf Certificates reward presentation quality. Rehearse the talk, design slides for the back row, and prepare for questions — the Q&A is where reviewers and future collaborators form their impression of you.

Use the conference as a network. Attend the co-located APCCAS sessions, visit the exhibitions, talk to the established researchers — that is explicitly what the conference is for. Bring questions about your research direction; senior attendees at student-focused conferences expect and welcome them.

Who Should Read and Cite These Proceedings

Postgraduate students and their supervisors in microelectronics, circuits and systems, and related electronic engineering; researchers tracking emerging directions in the Asia-Pacific circuits community; industry engineers scouting both ideas and talent; and anyone assembling a literature review in circuits and systems who wants the early-stage work, not just the mature journal versions. The proceedings are also a useful teaching resource: supervisors can point students to well-structured examples of thesis-level work presented at a professional standard.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is PrimeAsia?
The Asia Pacific Conference on Postgraduate Research in Microelectronics and Electronics — an IEEE Circuits and Systems Society initiative giving Master's and PhD students a professional international forum to present their research, benchmark it with peers, and connect with academia and industry. Proceedings ISSNs: 2159-2144 (print), 2159-2160 (electronic).

Who organizes and sponsors PrimeAsia?
It is an initiative of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (IEEE CASS), sponsored by the IEEE and IEEE CASS, with each edition run by an organizing committee from the host region's universities and IEEE volunteers.

Who can present at PrimeAsia?
Postgraduate students — Master's and PhD candidates — are the presenters; the conference is built around their participation, with established researchers attending as audience, reviewers, and mentors.

What are the Leaf Certificates?
Awards for presentation merit: Gold Leaf for the top 10% of student presentations, Silver for the next 10–20%, and Bronze for the following 20–30%, judged on technical contribution and paper/presentation quality.

How often is it held, and where are upcoming editions?
Recent editions: Shenzhen 2022 (with APCCAS), Busan 2025 (with APCCAS, 12–15 October), Fukuoka 2026 (25–28 October, ACROS Fukuoka); a 2027 edition is announced. Earlier editions include Hyderabad 2012 and Kuala Lumpur 2017.

Are papers peer-reviewed?
Yes — full papers are reviewed by specialists for technical merit, originality, and quality before acceptance for presentation and publication in the IEEE proceedings.

Does the proceedings have an impact factor?
No — impact factors are journal metrics, not assigned to conference proceedings. Directory data records an H-index of 12 for the series, to be interpreted with the usual database-coverage cautions.

Is there an APC?
No journal-style article processing charge. Authors register for the conference; student rates or support may be available per edition — check the official announcements.

How do I submit a paper?
Through the upcoming edition's call for papers: prepare a full paper to the IEEE template (distilling one clear thesis-level contribution with honest, complete results), submit via the edition's system (e.g., EasyChair) by the deadline, and prepare a strong presentation — it counts toward the Leaf awards.

How should I cite a PrimeAsia paper?
Authors, paper title, full conference name and edition/year, venue and dates, IEEE as publisher, proceedings ISSNs 2159-2144 / 2159-2160, and the paper DOI.

PrimeAsia and APCCAS: The Co-Location Advantage

Understanding PrimeAsia means understanding its relationship with APCCAS, the IEEE Asia Pacific Conference on Circuits and Systems. APCCAS is the region's premier circuits-and-systems conference — the established, senior forum where leading researchers present mature work. PrimeAsia's co-location with APCCAS is a deliberate design choice with benefits that flow in both directions.

For the student presenter, co-location means the audience for your PrimeAsia talk can include the very researchers whose papers you cited — they are already on site for APCCAS. It means you can attend APCCAS keynotes and technical sessions between your own commitments, absorbing the state of the art directly rather than through papers alone. It means the exhibitions, the industry booths, and the informal networking of a major conference are all within reach, multiplying the contacts a single trip can produce. And it means your first international conference experience happens inside a large, professionally run event, which sets the standard for everything that follows.

For the community, co-location creates a talent pipeline in plain sight. Professors recruiting PhD students or postdocs, and companies scouting junior engineers, can watch the next generation present before they ever see a CV. The Leaf Certificate awards add a credible, comparable signal to that scouting: a Gold Leaf tells a hiring committee that independent reviewers and judges rated this student's work and presentation in the top decile of an international IEEE forum. In regions where postgraduate research output is growing rapidly, that kind of standardized early-career signal has real value.

The pairing also reflects a broader truth about the Asia-Pacific microelectronics ecosystem. The region — spanning East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania — now accounts for a dominant share of the world's semiconductor manufacturing and a rapidly growing share of its circuits research. A student-focused conference that rotates across this geography, from Hyderabad to Kuala Lumpur to Shenzhen to Busan to Fukuoka, both serves and symbolizes that distributed strength. The proceedings, read across editions, map where the region's postgraduate energy is going: which topics draw the most submissions, which institutions are most active, and which ideas are migrating from student projects into the mainstream.

The Career Value of a Student Conference Done Well

It is worth being explicit about why a well-run student conference matters, because the benefits compound over a career. The first is the most obvious: a peer-reviewed IEEE publication early in postgraduate study. For a Master's student considering a PhD, or a PhD student approaching the job market, that first publication changes the conversation — it is evidence of completed, validated, communicated research.

The second benefit is the review process itself. PrimeAsia reviewers know they are reading student work, and the best reviews are genuinely developmental: they point out the missing comparison, the unclear figure, the overclaimed conclusion. Learning to receive that feedback, revise, and resubmit is professional training that no coursework provides.

The third is presentation skill. Many brilliant researchers underperform early in their careers because they cannot communicate their work. A conference that explicitly judges presentation quality — and rewards it with named certificates — teaches students to take communication as seriously as circuits. The talk you rehearse for PrimeAsia becomes the template for the thesis defense, the job talk, and every conference presentation after.

The fourth is the network. The fellow students you meet at PrimeAsia become the postdocs, professors, and industry engineers of the next decade — the reviewers of your future papers, the collaborators on your future projects, the hiring managers for your future jobs. Academic careers are built on such networks, and they are easiest to build when everyone is still a student.

Finally, there is benchmarking — the conference's stated purpose that is easy to undervalue. Reading papers tells you what is publishable; watching your peers present tells you what the standard actually is. Students return from PrimeAsia with a calibrated sense of where their work stands and what "excellent" looks like in their subfield. That calibration, applied over the remaining years of a PhD, is worth more than any single paper.