Chidi Chidambaram (Qualcomm Technologies Inc., San Diego, CA)

Semiconductor process technology will be a key enabler for the industry to meet the later generation 5G and eventually 6G requirements. This overview will describe the demands from these advanced wireless generations and current challenges facing the semiconductor Industry. Various components of the wireless system such as the digital modem, transceivers and radio frequency front-end chips each have unique requirements along the filters that route the traffic into different channels. The semiconductor industry innovations required for each of these components and the system integration as a whole will be summarized.

Biography:

Chidi Chidambaram leads the process technology and foundry engineering team at Qualcomm as Vice President Engineering. Qualcomm is a leader among the fab less industry in bringing leading edge semiconductor technologies to manufacturing - Qualcomm was the first company to ship large volume products in 10 nm technology in 2017. Chidi’s team is also responsible for RF devices based on finFET and SOI transistors. Earlier Chidi developed silicon technology at Texas Instruments and was instrumental in the first embedded SiGe implementation by the semiconductor Industry. Chidi is recognized as an IEEE Fellow for contribution to strain engineering and Design technology co-optimization (DTCO). Chidi’s 20+ year semiconductor career has evenly straddled research and development with over 60 each of refereed articles and patents.