Pushing CMOS to the Limits

Ali M. Niknejad
UC Berkeley

Monday, March 2, 2009 at 1:00PM
54-134 Engineering IV Building
Refreshments Served

Abstract: Silicon CMOS technology scaling has resulted in fast, tiny, and cheap transistors which are used as building blocks in digital, analog, and increasingly RF and video electronic devices. As the scaling continues, will the performance of analog/RF integrated circuits continue to suffer due to dynamic range limitations? Are there new opportunities or new design paradigms that can be used to overcome the limitations of CMOS? The first part of the talk will review some technological limitations related to noise, distortion, dynamic range, and speed. Performance limitations from a device and technology perspective account for only part of the story. The second part of the talk will highlight circuit design examples that overcome these limitations, allowing operation at record speeds over 100 GHz, relatively high power levels, and high linearity despite using low supply voltages and “digital” transistor technology.

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 in industry where he was involved with the design and research of CMOS RF integrated circuits and devices for wireless communication applications. Presently he is an associate professor in the EECS department at UC Berkeley. He is a Faculty Director of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC) and the BSIM Research Group. He served as an associate editor of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits and is currently serving on the TPC for the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). His current research interests lie within the area of RF/microwave and mmwave integrated circuits, particularly as applied to wireless and broadband communication circuits. His interests also include device modeling and numerical techniques in electromagnetics.