Keynote Abstract: Rich Goldman

Summary form only given. Global Warming is hot! Climate change is occurring all around us, and the scientific evidence is increasingly overwhelming pointing to man´s hand in the phenomena. We are already seeing huge impacts of Climate Change, much faster than anybody predicted only a few short years ago. What can we do about? How can we slow and even reverse our impact on Climate Change? The key man made contributing factor is carbon emissions, a greenhouse gas, primarily from coal fired power plants. Since these power plants operate to satisfy our need for power, we need to find sources of cleaner energy, reduce the number of plants that we are building, and then the number of power plants that we require. The key to making this happen is a reduction in power consumption. There are many simple everyday actions we can take individually to help. Al Gore states that Global Warming is an engineering problem that will be solved by engineers, and challenges them to address the issue as an opportunity, rather than as an additional cost. We will explore how engineers will positively impact Climate Change. Low Power IC design techniques are poised to play a key role in this critical effort, just as new powerful techniques are coming into vogue.