(July 15) A New Circuit Design Paradigm Exploiting Nonlinear Phenomena and mmWave Circuits and System for Communication and Imaging

To accommodate ever-growing demands for power-efficient and high-data rate communication as well as numerous newly-emerging applications such as imaging and healthcare in silicon, I will talk about interesting research from Cornell University and IBM.  In the first part of my talk, I will introduce a new circuit design methodology inspired by nonlinear wave propagation. This method is closely related to intriguing phenomena in other physics disciplines such as optics, fluid mechanics, and plasma physics. Based on this approach, I demonstrate three IC examples in a CMOS process: 1) a passive 20-GHz frequency divider based on a nonlinear oscillation for the first time implemented in CMOS, 2) a noise-squeezing amplifier to achieve sensitivity toward the thermal noise limit, and 3) an LC lattice to generate less than 10-ps pulses with a high amplitude using constructive nonlinear wave interaction. In the second part of my talk, I will briefly introduce millimeter wave circuits and system research in the IBM for multi-Gbps wireless links and imaging radar system.