Hesham Omran of Ain Shams University

Abstract:

The integrated circuit (IC) technology has witnessed an exponential advancement in the last decades and has changed every aspect in our life. On the other hand, the analog IC design flow did not experience any major change since the introduction of Berkeley SPICE in the 1970s, posing significant challenges to the design of complex systems and to the transfer of analog design expertise and knowledge. The Analog Designer’s Toolbox (ADT) is a new analog design productivity and automation tool that addresses this problem and defines a new paradigm in analog IC design. ADT provides a turnkey solution that enables everyone to reap the benefits of the gm/ID design methodology powered by precomputed lookup tables (LUTs). At the device level, ADT gives an easy interface to plot arbitrary design charts involving complex expressions. The designer can explore devices from different technologies at different corners and temperatures, and extract simulator-accurate design points while taking second-order effects into consideration. At the block level, ADT gives the designer the power of interactive design space exploration, agile constraints management, design trade-offs visualization, live tuning, and blazing speed optimization. Moreover, with a single click, ADT can build the testbenches in the background and report the results from your favorite simulator. The aim of ADT is to boost productivity, restore designer’s intuition, and make the design process systematic, optimized, and fun!

Biography:

Dr. Hesham Omran received the B.Sc. (with honors) and M.Sc. degrees from Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt, in 2007 and 2010, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia, in 2015, all in Electrical Engineering. From 2008 to 2011, he was a Design Engineer with Si-Ware Systems (SWS), Cairo, Egypt, where he worked on the circuit and system design of the first miniaturized FT-IR MEMS spectrometer (NeoSpectra), and a Research and Teaching Assistant with the Integrated Circuits Lab (ICL), Ain Shams University. From 2011 to 2016 he was a Researcher with the Sensors Lab, KAUST. He held internships with Bosch Research and Technology Center, CA, USA, and with Mentor Graphics, Cairo, Egypt. In 2016, he rejoined the ICL, Ain Shams University, where he is currently an Associate Professor. He developed and taught several advanced courses on different topics in the field of IC Design. Most of these courses are available on the Mastering Microelectronics YouTube channel with 5k+ subscribers. He co-founded Master Micro in 2020 to develop the Analog Designer’s Toolbox (ADT), a winner of the Egyptian ITIDA-TIEC startup program.

Dr. Hesham has received several awards including the Egyptian State Encouragement Award for Engineering Sciences in 2019, best paper award from the IEEE International Design and Test Conference in 2009, and Academic Excellence Awards from KAUST and Ain Shams University in 2011 and 2002, respectively. He has published 40+ papers in international journals and conferences. He serves as a reviewer for several international journals and conferences including IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems (TCAS) I & II, IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, and IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration Systems (TVLSI). His research interests are in the design of analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits, and especially in analog and mixed-signal CAD tools and design automation.

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