Events Calendar

Munushian Seminar - Asad Abidi, UCLA, Single-Chip Radios: The Next Generation

Speaker: Asad Abidi, UCLA

Talk Title: Single-Chip Radios: The Next Generation

Abstract: The term "integration" in microelectronics has come to mean the rapacious assimilation on to a single piece of silicon CMOS every conceivable function that makes up a complex system, stopping only where the laws of physics draw a hard line. Driven by the wireless revolution that gave us smartphones and wireless LAN which depend increasingly on elaborate uses of the available frequency bands, this is what has happened with radio transceivers. A collection of silicon chips and passive components which only a few years ago characterized a wireless transceiver is now heading towards an antenna that connects to essentially a single-chip radio of unprecedented versatility.
I will describe the unprecedented performance that is being demanded from today's radio-on-a-CMOS chip and how innovations in architecture and circuit design are coping with the pressures of lower supply voltages, poor quality on-chip passives, and the huge dynamic range of radio waveforms that are no longer conditioned by off-chip SAW filters and duplexers. This gives a glimpse into the next generation radios, and how close they are to hard limits on performance.


Biography: Asad Abidi received the BSc degree in Electrical Engineering from Imperial College, London in 1976, and the PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1982. He worked at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill until 1985, and then joined the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles where he is Distinguished Chancellor's Professor of Electrical Engineering. With his students he has developed many of the radio circuits and architectures that enable today's mobile devices.
Among other awards, Abidi has received the 2008 IEEE Donald O. Pederson Award in Solid-State Circuits and the Best Paper Award from the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits in 2012. The University of California Berkeley's Electrical Engineering Department recognized him as a Distinguished Alumnus in 2015. He is a Fellow of IEEE, and was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering and to TWAS, the world academy of sciences.


Host: EE-Electrophysics

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Marilyn Poplawski