Wireless Communication: Systems, Circuits, and Devices

Assistant Professor EECS
UC Berkeley
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 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 at 3-10 GHz and around 60 GHz that provides 7 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.

BIO:
Ali M. Niknejad received the B.S.E.E. degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1994, and his Mastes's and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1997 and 2000. After graduation from Berkeley he spent two years in industry designing analog 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 associate editor for the Journal of Solid-State Circuits. Prof. Niknejad is a BWRC faculty member and co-directory of the BSIM project.

His current research interests lie within the area of circuits for wireless and broadband communications. This includes implementation of integrated communication systems in silicon, device compact modeling, computer-aided design and optimization of such systems, and numerical techniques in electromagnetics particularly as applied to the analysis and modeling of active and passive devices at microwave frequencies.