Holistic Circuits for Future High-Frequency

EECS Distinguished Lecture Series

By:Prof. Ali Hajimiri

Thomas G. Myers Professor of Electrical Engineering

California Institute of Technology (CALTECH)

Refreshments will be available at 2:30PM

 

Today’s silicon transistors have evolved rapidly from their ancestors to be faster, smaller, and more numerous, while the die-area of the typical chips housing them has been constantly increasing. However, this has come at the cost of substantial degradations in voltage handling and matching properties due to fundamental considerations. The cut-off wavelengths of integrated silicon transistors have now substantially exceeded the die sizes of the chips being fabricated with them. Combined with the ability to integrate billions of transistors on the same die, this size-wavelength cross-over has produced a unique opportunity for completely new architectures and topologies, which were previously impractical due the traditional partitioning of various blocks in conventional design. These holistic circuits combine electromagnetics, device physics, digital/analog circuits, and system architecture in one place and produces orders of magnitude improvement in performance over the existing solutions. These circuits leverage ideas of parallelism, reconfigurablility, concurrency, self-healing, and stacking in more regular and periodic on-chip structures that are more compatible to modern fabrication processes and novel design and optimization approaches. In this talk, we discuss some of these opportunities and their associated challenges in some detail through a few examples in the areas of high-frequency power generation, efficient on-chip radiators, silicon-based THz imaging, self-healing system, versatile multi-modality (plastic, air, copper) interconnects, and biomedical sensors.

Bio

Ali Hajimiri (IEEE Fellow) received his B.S. degree in Electronics Engineering from the Sharif University of Technology, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the Stanford University in 1996 and 1998, respectively. He has been with Philips Semiconductors, where he worked on a BiCMOS chipset for GSM and cellular units from 1993 to 1994. In 1995, he was with Sun Microsystems working on the UltraSPARC microprocessor's cache RAM design methodology. During the summer of 1997, he was with Lucent Technologies (Bell Labs), Murray Hill, NJ, where he investigated low-phase-noise integrated oscillators. In 1998, he joined the Faculty of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, where he is Thomas G. Myers Professor of Electrical Engineering and the director of Microelectronics Laboratory. His research interests are high-speed and RF integrated circuits for applications in sensors, biomedical devices, and communication systems. Dr. Hajimiri is the author of The Design of Low Noise Oscillators (Boston, MA: Springer, 1999 and has authored and coauthored more than one hundred refereed journal and conference technical articles. He holds more than fifty U.S. and European patents.

Dr. Hajimiri was selected to the TR35 top innovator's list (formerly TR100) in 2004. He is a Fellow of IEEE and has served as a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Solid-State and Microwave Societies. He is the recipient of Caltech's Graduate Students Council Teaching and Mentoring award as well as the Associated Students of Caltech Undergraduate Excellence in Teaching Award. He was the Gold medal winner of the National Physics Competition and the Bronze Medal winner of the 21st International Physics Olympiad, Groningen, Netherlands. He was a co-recipient of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State circuits Best Paper Award of 2004, the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) Jack Kilby Outstanding Paper Award, a two-time co-recipient of CICC best paper award, and a three-time winner of the IBM faculty partnership award as well as NSF CAREER award and Okawa Foundation award. In 2002, he co-founded Axiom Microdevices Inc., whose fully-integrated CMOS PA has shipped more than one hundred and fifty million units, and was acquired by Skyworks Inc. in 2009.

 

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For more Information about the talk please contact Dr. Payam Heydari at payam@uci.edu