ISCAS 2012 will include for the second time a special session for confessing your mistakes, aimed at helping people avoid repeating them. Tell us what you never tell in your papers: What was your mistake? How did you make the mistake? How did you find out? How did you discover the ultimate origin of the mistake? What did you learn about avoiding this kind of mistake in the future? Confessions can be of all sorts - ranging from scientific and technical to strategic or marketing errors.  Your confession could save someone from making the same mistake you made!

A 90 minute session will be dedicated for 2-4 minute quick presentations of your confessions and the lessons learned.

Contributors should submit a maximum 400 word summary including at most 1 (one) figure, according to the format in the available template. The confession can be anonymous, if desired. If the confession is redundant with a previous or parallel confession it may not be included or they may be merged. Entries will be edited for clarity and conciseness by the organizers if needed. All the confessions will be organized and combined into a single multi-author paper of approximately 10 pages which will be circulated for corrections and comments. All non-anonymous contributors will be listed as authors on the single session paper.

The 2011 confession paper “Confession Session: Learning from Others Mistakes” is available through IEEE XPlore here. The slides from the 2011 confession session are also available here.

This year’s confession session will be organized by Viktor Gruev (chair of Analog Signal Processing Technical Committee) and Tobi Delbruck (chair of Sensory Systems Technical Committee). Please contact  if you have any questions.

The special confession submission deadline is extended to November 28, 2011.

To submit your confession, please title your regular text file submission "yourname.txt" and your figure (if needed) “yourname.png”. Send these files to  with the subject line "ISCAS 2012 confession", or use . Emails without the correct subject may be lost!

For your confession, please use the following template, which will help us to assemble the confession paper

• Summary subtitle: (e.g. Chip lacks a global reset)
• Confessor name(s): (max of 3 confessors per confession please!)
• Current affiliation: (e.g. ETH Zurich)
• Your confession: (max 400 words )

(example) We recently fabricated a test chip and forgot the bring the global reset node to a pin. How was this possible? It happened because one person was designing the chip core and the other the pad-frame and periphery. The core designer brought all the core outputs out, but not to one place all gathered together and clearly labeled as being intended for pad-frame connections. The periphery designer wired up all the core outputs, but not the hard-to-see global reset. The chip passed LVS because the reset pad was missing from the the layout and schematic. As a result, our chip may either not be resettable or stuck in reset, depending on the floating voltage of the reset node.
Moral of the story: (max 50 words) Example: Bring all your core signals clearly out to a few clearly labeled peripheral connection buses!

Optional figure: You can include 1 (one) figure in high resolution PNG, JPG, or EPS: (example: image of confusing layout and mislabeling of core signals) The figure should be titled yourname.extension. We must be able to include your figure in a Microsoft word document. PDFs are OK; we can generate PNGs from them. See last year’s paper for examples.