Things to Know Regarding ISSCC Paper Submission

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Published: Aug 28, 2024 by Kwantae Kim

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Conferences

IEEE International Solid-State Circuit Conference (ISSCC)

  • Things to Know Regarding ISSCC Paper Submission

Initial version: Oct 15, 2021 (in Korean)







IEEE ISSCC is a flagship conference for IC design where thousands people gather at San Francisco and share the state-of-the-art research. If this is your first try to submit an ISSCC paper, there are some important things to be considered very carefully.



Double-Blind Review

According to this strict double-blind review guideline, you as a paper author, must not reveal yourself in such a way that you can be identified by the review committees. This can be typically found in the PDF document of the Call for Papers on the ISSCC official Website.

  • Remove any logos, code names, or other marks from the chip photo or PCB.
    • Typically, a white rectangular box is added over the specific area of the photo.
    • These elements may be restored during the final submission stage, once the paper is accepted.
  • The allowed language is English only.
    • The use of other languages is not allowed, as they may imply that the authors are from a specific country.
    • For example, let’s say you used an oscilloscope and took a screenshot to be used for measurement results in Fig. 6, but the oscilloscope was set to Korean and the screenshot includes Korean. These kinds of situations are something that must be avoided and double/triple-checked.
  • Acknowledgments must not be included.
    • They can be added later once the paper is accepted.
  • Remove metadata from PDF files before uploading them to the submission system.
    • In Windows, you can remove metadata by Right Click → Properties → Details → Remove Properties and Personal Information.
    • This can be checked by sending the file to another computer and opening it there. If you cannot recognize your username from the PDF opened on another computer, then it means it is good to go.
    • In MacOS or Linux, unfortunately I have no idea how to remove metadata … (it would be appreciated if someone can let me know how to do it ).
  • Although it is written in the Call for Papers that
    “The submission site allows authors to modify the title (“Paper Title (blinded)”) if the intended title would reveal the authors or their affiliation”,
    it is a good practice to replace your project code with some other letters (like ‘XXXX’)
    • For example, my prior research Group at KAIST (led by Prof. Hoi-Jun Yoo) published DNPU at ISSCC’17, UNPU at ISSCC’18, LNPU at ISSCC’19, GANPU at ISSCC’20.
    • Yes, similar project codes with repeated ‘NPU’, several years in a row, can easily imply that the submitted paper is from a certain research group.
    • So, when the manuscript of the LNPU paper was submitted, Dr. Jinsu Lee, who was the leading author of the paper, formulated the title as “XXXX: A 25.3TFLOPS/W Sparse Deep-Neural-Network Learning Processor with Fine-Grained Mixed Precision of FP8-FP16” without ‘NPU’ term to anonymize the manuscript.
  • Citing your / your group’s previous work is Okay.
    • But you must not refer your paper in a way that may reveal your identity, for example using “Our previous work” or a similar expression.
    • As also stated in the Call for Papers, you can cite your work in the third person, for example, “XX technique was used in [2]” or “The XX architecture achieves higher XX performance than [3] ..”.



Acknowledgments
Thanks to Jinsu Lee for sharing experience on preparing paper title regarding the double-blind review!