EECS Joint Colloquium Distinguished Lecture Series
     
 

Wednesday, November 13, 2002
Hewlett Packard Auditorium, 306 Soda Hall
4:00-5:00 p.m.

Professor Ali Niknejad

EECS Dept.,
UC Berkeley
 
 

Wireless Communication: Systems, Circuits, and Devices

 

Abstract:
   

Wireless communication has become an integral part of our lives. We rely on several wireless technologies to provide voice and data at home and on the road. Today there are various competing and complementary standards for voice and data, and new products with wireless capability appear every day. The radio front-end circuitry is a key component in such systems, converting electromagnetic energy incident on the device to bits of data processed by the baseband circuitry. The design and manufacturing of these radios is currently time-consuming and expensive.

In the first part of this talk we will explore new radio architectures that are more amenable to mass production and integration. These architectures exploit deep sub-micron CMOS technology and MEMS devices that will ultimately result in a dramatic improvement in the level of integration. In the second part of the talk, we focus on a new frequency band around 60 GHz that provides 5 GHz of unlicensed spectrum. We believe that a CMOS radio with multiple antennas can utilize this spectrum for Gb/s wireless LAN connectivity. We will explore system, circuit, and device issues to make such a radio possible.

    Biography:
   

Ali M. Niknejad received the B.S.E.E. degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1994, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1997 and 2000. From 2000-2002 he worked at Silicon Laboratories in Austin, TX, where he was involved with the design and research of CMOS RF integrated circuits and devices for wireless communication applications. Presently he is an assistant professor in the EECS department at UC Berkeley. He is an active member at the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC) and he is the co-director of the BSIM Research Group. He is currently serving as an associate editor of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits. His current research interests lie within the area of analog integrated circuits, particularly as applied to wireless and broadband communication circuits. His interests also include device modeling and numerical techniques in electromagnetics.