The EAMTA school of microelectronics was held for a week in Sept 2007 in Cordoba, Argentina. It was organized by Pedro Julian and Pablo Mandolesi (the local CAS chapter chair) with lots of help from many others and sponsorship from the IEEE CAS society and several companies, including Clariphy, Synposys, Freescale, and MOSIS.

The school had about 75 students from all over Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, Columbia). It was held at the Catholic University of Cordoba. Cordoba is the second largest city in Argentina with about 1.3M people and is the main industrial city. It is located in the center of Argentina about an hour's flight west from Buenos Aries.

The school went daily from about 8am until late in the evening. There were advanced seminars and tutorials on a broad range of electronics, including logic design, mixed signal systems, and analog circuit design. Students designed their own circuits in simulation and physical layout and tested circuits themselves.

In addition there were about 20 papers submitted to this conference which were presented as posters during the coffee breaks.

One of the things we did at the school was to use the silicon retina to build a money-catching robot.

Here's a quicktime video of what we built in 2 days: billcatcher2007.mov

Students discussed and measured MOS circuits

Heard interesting talks about microelectronics

And of course had an asado or two.