Abstract: While CMOS transistors came to dominate integrated circuits, some other transistor types such as the bipolar junction transistor (BJT); its variant, the super-beta BJT; the junction gate field-effect transistor (JFET) and laterally diffused metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (LDMOS) continue to thrive in specific applications. The talk will re-visit the discovery of these transistor types, their operating principles and key characteristics and look at circuit examples that benefit from these characteristics. We will look how these transistors have eluded extinction despite their larger feature sizes and process complexities and how they have evolved in modern technologies.
Speaker Bio: Viola Schäffer (IEEE Member) received her M.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Arizona, Tucson in 1999. She joined Texas Instruments Incorporated (formerly Burr-Brown Corporation) in 1998 and has been working as an analog IC design engineer and manager at various locations including Tucson, Arizona, as well as Erlangen and Freising in Germany. She was elected TI Fellow in 2023.
Her work focuses on precision signal conditioning including instrumentation and programmable gain amplifiers, power amplifiers, industrial drivers as well as magnetic-based current sensors and precision magnetic sensors. She has design experience in CMOS, HV-CMOS, precision bipolar, and BCD processes. She has led multiple technology-circuit co-developments and designed key enabling IP on these new process nodes. She has several IEEE publications and holds 18 patents related to this work with several applications pending. She has served on the technical program committees for ESSCIRC ISSCC, and SSCS webinars and on the ISSCC European Region Leadership Team. She is currently serving as the ISSCC Analog Subcommittee Chair.