Prof. Ehsan Afshari

There are plenty of intriguing physical phenomena around us: from wave propagation in ocean to the movement of roller-coasters. These everyday examples can be used as inspiration in analog and RF circuit design. In this talk, we will show three examples of novel circuits that can achieve a much better performance compared to the conventional circuit topologies. The examples are focused on high speed, broadband, and low noise circuits.

Biography:

Ehsan Afshari received the B.Sc. degree in Electronics Engineering from the Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran and the M.S. and Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, in 2003, and 2006, respectively. In August 2006, he joined the faculty in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University as an Assistant Professor, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2012. In the fall of 2016, he joined the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, as an Associate Professor. His research interests are mm-wave and terahertz electronics and low-noise integrated circuits for applications in communication systems, sensing, and biomedical devices.

Prof. Afshari serves as the Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society and a member of the Technical Program Committee of the IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium (RFIC). He was the chair of the IEEE Ithaca section, the chair of Cornell Highly Integrated Physical Systems (CHIPS), a member of International Technical Committee of the IEEE Solid-State Circuit Conference (ISSCC), a member of the Analog Signal Processing Technical Committee of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, a member of the Technical Program Committee of the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC), and a member of Technical Program Committee of the IEEE International Conference on Ultra-Wideband (ICUWB). He is selected as one of 50 most distinguished alumni of Sharif University. He was awarded National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2010, Cornell College of Engineering Michael Tien excellence in teaching award in 2010, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award in 2008, and Iran's Best Engineering Student award by the President of Iran in 2001. He is also the recipient of the 2003 Custom Integrated Circuits Conf. (CICC) Best Paper Award, the first place at the 2005 Stanford-Berkeley-Caltech Inventors Challenge, the 1999 Iranian Conference on Electrical Engineering Best Undergraduate Paper Award, the recipient of the Silver Medal in the 1997 Physics Olympiad, and the recipient of the Award of Excellence in Engineering Education from Association of Professors and Scholars of Iranian Heritage (APSIH), May 2004.

Prof. Jerald Yoo

Chronic diseases account for more than one-third of the deaths around the world. To mitigate the impact of such diseases, healthcare paradigm is now shifting from reactive illness management towards proactive and preemptive health management; the goal here is to maintain a healthy life in the first place or to prevent illness from getting any worse by continuously monitoring health during normal daily life. Body Area Network (BAN) is an attractive means for continuous and pervasive health monitoring, yet its unique and harsh environment gives circuit designers many challenges.  As human body absorbs the majority of RF energy around GHz band, existing RF radio may not be an ideal for communications between and on-body sensors. In order solve the issues, this talk covers two types of BAN: body coupled-based and wired/fabric-based. Body-coupled based BAN utilizes human body itself as a communication medium, where the lecture will begin with channel characteristics, followed by design considerations and transceiver implementation examples. For the wired/fabric based BAN, we will cover several flexible platforms that enable BAN, and discuss what and how circuit designers should consider such non-conventional environments. Low energy circuit techniques to overcome their limitations will also be discussed. We will then will review their various system aspects.

Biography:

Jerald Yoo (S’05-M’10-SM’15) received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Department of Electrical Engineering from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Korea, in 2002, 2007, and 2010, respectively. Since 2017, he has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore, where he is currently an Associate Professor. From 2010 to 2016, he was with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Masdar Institute, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, where he was an Associate Professor. He has developed low-energy body-area-network (BAN) transceivers and wearable body sensor network using the planar-fashionable circuit board for continuous health monitoring system. He has authored book chapters in Biomedical CMOS ICs (Springer, 2010) and in Enabling the Internet of Things—From Circuits to Networks (Springer, 2017). His current research interests include low-energy circuit technology for wearable bio signal sensors, flexible circuit board platform, BAN transceivers, ASIC for piezoelectric Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducers (pMUT) and System-on-Chip (SoC) design to system realization for wearable healthcare applications. Dr. Yoo is the recipient or a co-recipient of several awards: the IEEE International Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) 2015 Best Paper Award (BioCAS Track), ISCAS 2015 Runner-Up Best Student Paper Award, the Masdar Institute Best Research Award in 2015 and the IEEE Asian Solid-State Circuits Conference (A-SSCC) Outstanding Design Awards (2005). He was the Vice Chair of IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS) United Arab Emirates (UAE) Chapter. Currently, he serves as a Technical Program Committee Member of the IEEE A-SSCC, IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC), and the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) Student Research Preview (SRP). He is also an Analog Signal Processing Technical Committee Member of IEEE Circuits and Systems Society.