UCLA Electrical Engineering Department

Dr. Frank Chang is the Wintek Chair Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department, and the Director of the High Speed Electronics Laboratory, at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Before joining UCLA, he was the Assistant Director and Department Manager of the High Speed Electronics Laboratory at the Rockwell Science Center (1983-1997), Thousand Oaks, California. In this tenure, he successfully developed and transferred AlGaAs/GaAs Heterojunction Bipolar Transistor (HBT) and BiFET (Planar HBT/MESFET) integrated circuits technologies form the research laboratory to the production line (now Conexant Systems and Skyworks). The HBT and BiFET productions have grown into multi-billion dollar businesses worldwide. Throughout his career, his research has been mostly in the development of high-speed semiconductor devices and integrated circuits for RF & mixed-signal communication and sensing system applications. He was the principal investigator at Rockwell to lead the US DARPA ADC and DAC development for direct conversion transceiver (DCT) and digital radar receivers (DRR) systems. He was the inventor of the multi-band, re-configurable RF-Interconnects based on FDMA and CDMA multiple access algorithms for intra- and inter-ULSI communications. He pioneered the development of world's first multi-gigabit/sec ADC, DAC and DDS in both GaAs HBT and Si CMOS technologies and the first 60GHz radio transceiver based on transformer-folded-cascode (Origami) circuit architecture and low phase noise VCO with embedded digitally controlled artificial dielectric (DiCAD). He was also the first to demonstrate CMOS RFICs in the Tera-Hertz frequency range of 324GHz. Dr. Chang has authored or co-authored over 250 technical papers, 10 book chapters, authored 1 book, edited 1 books and holds 20 U.S. patents. He was an editor of the IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices (1999-2001) and served as a guest editor for the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits in 1991 and 1992 and for the Journal of High-Speed Electronics and Systems in 1994.

Dr. Chang was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2008, for the development and commercialization of GaAs power amplifiers and integrated circuits. He received the IEEE David Sarnoff Award in 2006 and became a Fellow of IEEE in 1996. He also received Rockwell's Leonardo Da Vinci Award (Engineer of the Year) in 1992, National Chiao-Tung University's Distinguished Alumnus Award in 1997 and National Tsing-Hua University's Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2002.

Research Interests

Professor Chang's research covers several areas: 1) RF/CDMA/FDMA and AC coupled multi-band interconnects for reconfigurable and bi-directional intra- and inter-chip communications, especially for on-chip Chip-Multiprocessors (CMP) inter-core communications and off-chip bus interfaces (e.g., between CPUs and memories) and serial/parallel links; 2) Silicon based RFIC and MMIC up to the Tera-Hertz frequency bands; 3) software-defined or Re-configurable multi-band and multi-mode radios in deep-scaled CMOS based on digitally controlled artificial dielectric (DiCAD); 4) Adaptive high speed and high resolution ADC/DAC for real-time multi-function systems.

Awards and Recognitions

• 2008 Pan Wen-Yuan Award

• 2008 National Academy of Engineering

• Best Paper Award, IEEE Computer Society for High Performance, Computer Architecture Conference

• 2006 IEEE David Sarnoff Award

• 2002 Distinguished Alumnus Award from the National Tsing-Hua University

• 1997 Distinguished Alumnus Award from the National Chiao-Tung University

• 1996 IEEE Fellow

• 1993 Leonardo da Vinci Award from Rockwell International

Books

F.M.C. Chang, Current Trends in Heterojunction Bipolar Transistors, World Scientific, NJ, 1996