European Solid-State Circuits Conference

About European Solid-State Circuits Conference

About the European Solid-State Circuits Conference

The European Solid-State Circuits Conference, universally known by its acronym ESSCIRC, is one of Europe's two historic annual meetings for solid-state electronics, and its published proceedings form the serial record catalogued under ISSN 1930-8833. ESSCIRC is a conference, not a journal: researchers submit short, tightly reviewed papers describing new integrated circuits and circuit techniques, present them at the annual meeting, and the accepted papers are published as the year's proceedings volume, distributed through IEEE Xplore. This profile therefore treats the title honestly as a conference proceedings series, because that is what a reader who follows its ISSN will actually find.

For decades ESSCIRC ran as a sister event alongside ESSDERC, the European Solid-State Device Research Conference. The pairing was structural rather than incidental: the two conferences were governed by a common steering committee, shared plenary keynote presentations, and ran joint sessions designed to bridge the device and circuit communities, with attendees of either conference encouraged to attend sessions of the other. The logic was technological. Advances in semiconductor devices only become products when circuit designers exploit them, and circuit ambitions are constantly limited or enabled by what fabrication technology can deliver, so Europe's device researchers and circuit designers were deliberately brought into the same rooms each autumn.

From 2024 that long partnership was formalised into a single conference. The first European Solid-State Electronics Research Conference, shortened to ESSERC, was held in Bruges, Belgium, on 9–12 September 2024, and was explicitly referenced as the 50th ESSERC in recognition of the lineage it inherited. ESSERC operates with a single technical programme committee, a coordinating steering committee, and three tracks — Circuits, Technologies, and a Joint Track — replacing the twin-conference structure while keeping its historical link to both ESSDERC and ESSCIRC visible in its identity. The ESSCIRC proceedings record nevertheless remains a live bibliographic entity in its own right: decades of volumes, still cited daily by circuit designers, and still the name under which indexing services track the series.

At a Glance

Aim and Place in the Field

The stated aim of ESSCIRC, repeated across its official calls for papers, is to provide an annual European forum for the presentation and discussion of recent advances in solid-state devices and circuits. The calls make a second point that explains the conference's character: the level of integration in system-on-chip design keeps rising, driven by advances in semiconductor technology, and that makes deeper interaction among technologists, device experts, integrated-circuit designers and system designers more necessary, not less. ESSCIRC was built as that interaction point for Europe, in the way that the International Solid-State Circuits Conference serves the global community from North America and the Asian Solid-State Circuits Conference serves Asia.

In practice, the conference's prestige rests on a demanding norm shared with its sister venues worldwide: circuit papers are expected to report fabricated, measured silicon. A simulation-only design, however elegant, competes at a disadvantage against papers that present a manufactured chip, its measured performance, its die photograph and its comparison against the prior state of the art. That norm shapes the whole research cycle of the European circuits community. Groups plan fabrication runs, often through multi-project wafer services, so that measured results exist by the submission deadline; doctoral students time thesis work around tape-outs; and industrial laboratories use the conference to demonstrate process and product advances that journal papers will later document at full length.

The proceedings therefore function as a dated, public record of what European — and, increasingly, global — circuit research groups could actually build in a given year. Reading consecutive volumes is a compressed history of the field: the migration across CMOS process generations, the rise of radio-frequency CMOS, the data-converter performance race, the energy-efficiency turn driven by mobile and then by sensing and edge computing, and the current wave of circuits for machine-learning acceleration, quantum interfaces and biomedical systems.

Scope in Depth

The circuit scope, as set out in the joint calls for papers, spans the full range of integrated circuit design. Analog circuits form the historic core: amplifiers, filters, references and the interface circuitry on which every mixed-signal system depends. Data converters — analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog — are a perennial strength, with papers competing on resolution, speed and energy efficiency figures of merit. Radio-frequency and millimetre-wave circuits cover transceivers, power amplifiers, phase-locked loops and frequency generation for wireless systems from sub-gigahertz radios to automotive radar and beyond-5G front ends. Wireless and wireline interfaces address the serial links, optical interfaces and chip-to-chip communication on which data centres and consumer devices depend.

Power is a second major territory. Integrated power electronics and power management papers address voltage converters, energy harvesting interfaces, battery management and the delivery of clean, efficient supply rails inside systems-on-chip — work whose importance has grown as energy, rather than transistor count, became the binding constraint on design. Digital circuits and systems papers cover processors, accelerators, memories and design techniques at advanced nodes, including the near-threshold and energy-harvesting designs explored for severely power-limited applications.

A third territory sits at the boundary with the device community, and it is here that the ESSDERC pairing and the later ESSERC joint track matter most. Sensors, MEMS interfaces, bioelectronics and biomedical electronics, optoelectronics, displays and imaging arrays all require circuit and device innovation together. The joint calls also emphasised emerging directions that have since become central: neuromorphic computing, advanced memories, accelerators for artificial intelligence, in-memory computing, hardware security, advanced CMOS and post-CMOS devices, and quantum computing circuits and interfaces. Student papers were explicitly welcomed and encouraged in the calls, reflecting the conference's role as the European training ground where young circuit designers first present measured silicon to an expert audience.

From ESSCIRC and ESSDERC to ESSERC

The 2024 restructuring deserves careful explanation, because researchers searching catalogues will meet all three acronyms. Until 2023, the autumn meeting consisted of two coordinated conferences: ESSDERC for devices and ESSCIRC for circuits, sharing plenaries and joint sessions — the 2023 edition, for example, met in Lisbon. From 2024, the communities merged the event into ESSERC, the European Solid-State Electronics Research Conference, keeping a single programme committee and three tracks so that a circuits paper, a technologies paper and a joint paper are reviewed within one coherent programme rather than across two overlapping ones. The Bruges 2024 edition was counted as the 50th, anchoring the new name in the older conferences' combined history, and subsequent editions, including the 2026 meeting in Palma de Mallorca publicised by the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society, continue under the ESSERC name.

For bibliographic purposes the practical consequences are these. Papers from the ESSCIRC era are cited to the ESSCIRC proceedings of their year, and those citations remain correct and resolvable through IEEE Xplore. New work in the same tradition now appears under ESSERC. A literature search on a circuit topic that stops at the name change will silently miss either the older or the newer literature, so searchers should query both titles, and librarians should expect the ESSCIRC ISSN record to describe a series whose living continuation publishes under the ESSERC banner. This profile flags that continuation explicitly so that Journals World users are not misled into treating ESSCIRC as a venue still accepting papers under its old name in its old format.

Peer Review, Papers and the Journal Pathway

Selection at ESSCIRC followed the standard model of a competitive IEEE circuits conference, operated through its technical programme committee: submitted papers were reviewed by specialists, the programme was assembled from the strongest submissions, and acceptance rates were low enough that an ESSCIRC paper became a meaningful career signal for its authors. The short format — historically four A4 pages with all illustrations and references included in the joint calls — forces a distinctive rhetoric: one clear circuit idea, one fabricated implementation, one compact table of measured comparisons against prior art. Authors who master that compression at ESSCIRC learn the house style of the entire solid-state circuits discipline.

The conference also connects upward to the archival journal of the field, the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits. Selected ESSCIRC papers have traditionally been invited to expand into full journal versions, published in special issues devoted to the conference; the introduction to the special issue on the 46th ESSCIRC, published in the journal in 2017, is one documented example of that pathway in operation. The invitation is an honour and a filter, not an automatic route: the journal version must add substantial material, analysis and completeness beyond the four-page proceedings paper, and it passes through journal peer review. Researchers evaluating a group or a job candidate should therefore distinguish the proceedings paper from any later expanded journal version and cite each correctly.

Indexing, Metrics and How to Judge Them

The Journals World record carries an H-index of 42 and an SJR of 0.966 for this title, drawn from the Scopus-based ranking of conference proceedings sources. Such figures describe the accumulated citation weight of the proceedings series as a whole. They are respectable for a European regional conference, and they reflect the reality that many ESSCIRC papers are heavily cited by later circuit work. They should nonetheless be read differently from journal metrics. A proceedings H-index aggregates decades of volumes and thousands of papers; it does not certify any individual paper, and it is not comparable with the H-index of a journal that publishes a few hundred articles a year. No Journal Impact Factor applies to this title, and any third-party site assigning one to a conference proceedings series is misusing the term.

The meaningful prestige indicators for ESSCIRC are instead its longevity, its governance by the European circuits and devices community under IEEE societies, its measured-silicon norm, and its role as a feeder of expanded papers into the field's leading journal. Employers and funders in microelectronics recognise the name directly; the metric profile is supporting evidence, not the substance of the reputation.

Who Should Submit, and Who Should Read

The natural authors are integrated-circuit research groups in universities, research institutes and industry who have, or will imminently have, fabricated test chips with measured results in analog, radio-frequency, converter, power, digital, sensor-interface or emerging-device circuits. Under the merged ESSERC format, device and technology groups submit to the Technologies track and collaborative teams to the Joint Track, which now formalises the audience ESSCIRC always served. Doctoral students are explicitly encouraged in the calls, and a first measured-silicon paper at this venue is a recognised milestone in a European circuit designer's training.

The natural readers are circuit designers tracking the state of the art in their speciality, system architects judging what performance and efficiency are currently achievable in silicon, device technologists looking for the circuit pull on their technology, and historians or analysts of the semiconductor field reading the year-by-year record. If you need a full archival treatment with complete analysis, follow a proceedings paper forward to its expanded journal version where one exists; if you need to know what was demonstrably buildable in a given year, the proceedings volume itself is the primary evidence.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is ESSCIRC a journal? No. It is an annual conference whose accepted papers are published as proceedings, distributed by IEEE. The ISSN belongs to the proceedings series.

Does ESSCIRC still exist? The circuits and devices conferences were combined into a single event, ESSERC, from 2024, with Circuits, Technologies and Joint tracks. ESSCIRC volumes up to the merger remain the correct citation target for work published under that name.

What does the conference cover? Solid-state circuits in full: analog, data converters, radio-frequency and millimetre-wave, frequency generation, wireless and wireline interfaces, power management, digital circuits and systems, sensors and biomedical electronics, and joint circuit-device topics including neuromorphic, in-memory and quantum-related circuits.

How long are the papers? The joint ESSCIRC–ESSDERC calls historically specified four A4 pages including illustrations and references. Authors should always follow the current ESSERC call, which governs the present-day event.

Can a proceedings paper become a journal paper? Selected papers have been invited to submit substantially expanded versions to the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, including in conference special issues, subject to full journal review.

Who publishes the proceedings? IEEE publishes and distributes them through IEEE Xplore. The Journals World record names IEEE Computer Society as publisher; the circuits community's sponsoring IEEE society is the Solid-State Circuits Society, working with the device community — see the verification note below.

A Reader's Guide to the Proceedings Volumes

Finding a specific ESSCIRC paper requires thinking in years rather than in journal issues. Each annual meeting produced one proceedings volume, identified by the conference year and the host city, and the papers inside it are ordered by the technical sessions in which they were presented. In IEEE Xplore, the reliable search strategy is to combine the conference name with a distinctive phrase from the circuit technique or the lead author's name, and then to confirm the year, because circuit groups often publish a sequence of related designs across successive editions and a search engine will happily return the wrong generation of a chip. The table of measured results inside the paper itself is the anchor: it states the process technology, supply voltage, die area and performance figures against which that year's claims should be read.

Reading across volumes, rather than within one, is how specialists use the series for technology assessment. A data converter designer, for example, can trace a single figure of merit through ten successive volumes and see both the genuine progress and the changes in measurement practice that complicate direct comparison. A manager or investor assessing a research group can do the same with that group's appearances, distinguishing a laboratory that reports measured silicon year after year from one whose output is mostly simulation studies elsewhere. The proceedings also preserve the invited and plenary layer of each meeting, keynote talks by industry and academic leaders that framed the field's agenda for that year, which historians of the semiconductor industry find disproportionately useful, because those talks record what the European community believed its priorities were before the outcomes were known.

Citation hygiene matters with this series. Cite the proceedings paper with its conference year and page numbers as given in IEEE Xplore, and if an expanded journal version later appeared in the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, cite that version separately for the fuller analysis rather than silently treating the two as interchangeable. Where a library catalogue offers both the ESSCIRC title and the successor ESSERC title, prefer the title under which the paper actually appeared; the name on the volume, not the current name of the event, is the correct bibliographic fact.

Key Facts and Verification Notes

ESSCIRC is Europe's long-running solid-state circuits conference, historically paired with ESSDERC under a common steering committee, publisher-distributed by IEEE under proceedings ISSN 1930-8833, with a site-record H-index of 42 and SJR of 0.966, and combined with its sister conference into ESSERC from the Bruges edition of September 2024. This profile is based on the conferences' official calls for papers, the IEEE announcement of the 2024 ESSERC edition, and IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society material on the continuing event. One structured-field point is flagged for correction: the site record lists the publisher as IEEE Computer Society, whereas the conference belongs to the IEEE solid-state circuits and electron devices community — the Solid-State Circuits Society publicises and supports the event — so the publisher field would be more accurately recorded simply as IEEE. No duplicate record was identified from the sources consulted for this profile.