Ehsan Afshari | |
---|---|
Known for | Terahertz Integrated Circuits |
Awards | Presidential Award of National Best Engineering Student, Awarded by the President of Iran (2000) Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award (2008) National Science Foundation (NSF) Early CAREER Award (2010) Selected as one of 50 Most Distinguished Alumni of Sharif University (2016) |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Sharif University of Technology California Institute of Technology |
Academic work | |
Institutions | University of Michigan |
Ehsan Afshari is an American electrical engineer,researcher and academic. He is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Michigan. [1]
Afshari's research is focused on high frequency circuits and systems for imaging,bio-sensing,and high data rate communications. He has written over 150 papers. He was the recipient of the 2008 DAPRA Young Faculty Award [2] and the 2010 NSF Early CAREER Award. [3]
Afshari received a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 2001. He then moved to the United States,where he joined California Institute of Technology,completing his M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering in 2003 and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2006. [1]
After completing his Ph.D.,Afshari joined Cornell University as an assistant professor,becoming associate professor in 2012. In 2016,he joined University of Michigan as an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. In 2019,he became Full Professor at University of Michigan. [1]
As a result of his research,Afshari co-founded Airvine [4] and Lassenpeak. [5]
Afshari has been an advisor to many PhD students that became faculty members at major universities. [6]
After completing his Ph.D.,Afshari changed his research focus to terahertz circuits and systems. When he began research in this area,most of the terahertz systems used expensive and bulky devices such as quantum cascade lasers. Starting from 2010,Afshari's team started to develop circuit blocks and systems operating at terahertz frequencies using conventional transistor technologies. One of the early milestones of his group was the design and fabrication of the first integrated oscillator operating above 400 GHz which generated more than 100 uW of power. [7] At the time of design,this oscillator generated three orders of magnitude higher power compared to prior art.
His team has continued advancing the terahertz electronics research and have designed the first terahertz voltage controlled oscillator (VCO), [8] the first 2-dimensional terahertz phased array, [9] the highest frequency active multiplier,the first fully integrated frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar operating above 200 GHz, [10] and the first phase-locked terahertz imaging transceiver chipset all based on standard Si/SiGe technologies. [11] Aside from these designs,Afshari's team has been active in other areas of research including but not limited to low-phase-noise radio-frequency VCO's, [12] high-power and power-efficient mm-wave oscillators,and non-boolean pattern recognition circuits. [13]
In electronics and especially synchronous digital circuits,a clock signal is an electronic logic signal which oscillates between a high and a low state at a constant frequency and is used like a metronome to synchronize actions of digital circuits. In a synchronous logic circuit,the most common type of digital circuit,the clock signal is applied to all storage devices,flip-flops and latches,and causes them all to change state simultaneously,preventing race conditions.
A bandgap voltage reference is a temperature independent voltage reference circuit widely used in integrated circuits. It produces a fixed (constant) voltage regardless of power supply variations,temperature changes,or circuit loading from a device. It commonly has an output voltage around 1.25 V. This circuit concept was first published by David Hilbiber in 1964. Bob Widlar,Paul Brokaw and others followed up with other commercially successful versions.
Integrated injection logic (IIL,I2L,or I2L) is a class of digital circuits built with multiple collector bipolar junction transistors (BJT). When introduced it had speed comparable to TTL yet was almost as low power as CMOS,making it ideal for use in VLSI (and larger) integrated circuits. The gates can be made smaller with this logic family than with CMOS because complementary transistors are not needed. Although the logic voltage levels are very close (High:0.7V,Low:0.2V),I2L has high noise immunity because it operates by current instead of voltage. I2L was developed in 1971 by Siegfried K. Wiedmann and Horst H. Berger who originally called it merged-transistor logic (MTL). A disadvantage of this logic family is that the gates draw power when not switching unlike with CMOS.
The W band of the microwave part of the electromagnetic spectrum ranges from 75 to 110 GHz,wavelength ≈2.7–4 mm. It sits above the U.S. IEEE-designated V band (40–75 GHz) in frequency,and overlaps the NATO designated M band (60–100 GHz). The W band is used for satellite communications,millimeter-wave radar research,military radar targeting and tracking applications,and some non-military applications.
The asynchronous array of simple processors (AsAP) architecture comprises a 2-D array of reduced complexity programmable processors with small scratchpad memories interconnected by a reconfigurable mesh network. AsAP was developed by researchers in the VLSI Computation Laboratory (VCL) at the University of California,Davis and achieves high performance and energy-efficiency,while using a relatively small circuit area. It was made in 2006.
Domino logic is a CMOS-based evolution of the dynamic logic techniques based on either PMOS or NMOS transistors. It allows a rail-to-rail logic swing. It was developed to speed up circuits,solving the premature cascade problem,typically by inserting small and fast pFETs between domino stages to constrain the interstage cascade velocity to a curtailed maximum—a curtailed deterministic maximum—without requiring other circuit design interlocks.
Injection locking and injection pulling are the frequency effects that can occur when a harmonic oscillator is disturbed by a second oscillator operating at a nearby frequency. When the coupling is strong enough and the frequencies near enough,the second oscillator can capture the first oscillator,causing it to have essentially identical frequency as the second. This is injection locking. When the second oscillator merely disturbs the first but does not capture it,the effect is called injection pulling. Injection locking and pulling effects are observed in numerous types of physical systems,however the terms are most often associated with electronic oscillators or laser resonators.
Asad Ali Abidi is a Pakistani-American electrical engineer. He serves as a tenured professor at University of California,Los Angeles,and is the inaugural holder of the Abdus Salam Chair at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). He is best known for pioneering RF CMOS technology during the late 1980s to early 1990s. As of 2008,the radio transceivers in all wireless networking devices and modern mobile phones are mass-produced as RF CMOS devices.
Behzad Razavi is an Iranian-American professor and researcher of electrical and electronic engineering. Noted for his research in communications circuitry,Razavi is the director of the Communication Circuits Laboratory at the University of California Los Angeles. He is a Fellow and a distinguished lecturer for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Among his awards,Razavi is a two-time recipient of the Beatrice Winner Award for Editorial Excellence at the 1994 and 2001 International Solid-State Circuits Conferences. In 2017,he was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to low-power broadband communication circuits.
Daniel "Dan" William Dobberpuhl was an electrical engineer in the United States who led several teams of microprocessor designers.
Ali Hajimiri is an academic,entrepreneur,and inventor in various fields of engineering,including electrical engineering and biomedical engineering. He is the Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
Microelectromechanical system oscillators are devices that generate highly stable reference frequencies to measure time. The core technologies used in MEMS oscillators have been in development since the mid-1960s,but have only been sufficiently advanced for commercial applications since 2006. MEMS oscillators incorporate MEMS resonators,which are microelectromechanical structures that define stable frequencies. MEMS clock generators are MEMS timing devices with multiple outputs for systems that need more than a single reference frequency. MEMS oscillators are a valid alternative to older,more established quartz crystal oscillators,offering better resilience against vibration and mechanical shock,and reliability with respect to temperature variation.
Ian A. Young is an Intel engineer. Young is a co-author of 50 research papers,and has 71 patents in switched capacitor circuits,DRAM,SRAM,BiCMOS,x86 clocking,Photonics and spintronics.
Donhee Ham is Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering at Harvard University and Fellow of Samsung Electronics.
A nanoelectromechanical (NEM) relay is an electrically actuatedswitch that is built on the nanometer scale using semiconductor fabrication techniques. They are designed to operate in replacement of,or in conjunction with,traditional semiconductor logic. While the mechanical nature of NEM relays makes them switch much slower than solid-state relays,they have many advantageous properties,such as zero current leakage and low power consumption,which make them potentially useful in next generation computing.
Payam Heydari is an Iranian-American Professor who is noted for his contribution to the field of radio-frequency and millimeter-wave integrated circuits.
Kenneth L Shepard is an American electrical engineer,nanoscientist,entrepreneur,and the Lau Family Professor of Electrical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at the Columbia School of Engineering and Applied Science (Columbia).
The IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal on new developments and research in solid-state circuits,published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in New York City. The journal serves as a companion venue for expanding on work presented at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference,the Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits,and the Custom Integrated Circuits Conference. The journal has an impact factor of 6.12 and is edited by Dennis Sylvester.
RF CMOS is a metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) integrated circuit (IC) technology that integrates radio-frequency (RF),analog and digital electronics on a mixed-signal CMOS RF circuit chip. It is widely used in modern wireless telecommunications,such as cellular networks,Bluetooth,Wi-Fi,GPS receivers,broadcasting,vehicular communication systems,and the radio transceivers in all modern mobile phones and wireless networking devices. RF CMOS technology was pioneered by Pakistani engineer Asad Ali Abidi at UCLA during the late 1980s to early 1990s,and helped bring about the wireless revolution with the introduction of digital signal processing in wireless communications. The development and design of RF CMOS devices was enabled by van der Ziel's FET RF noise model,which was published in the early 1960s and remained largely forgotten until the 1990s.
Edoardo Charbon is a Swiss electrical engineer. He is a professor of quantum engineering at EPFL and the head of the Laboratory of Advanced Quantum Architecture (AQUA) at the School of Engineering.