SSCS Predoctoral Achievement Award

Pouyan Bassirian

Pouyan Bassirian received his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tehran, Iran, in 2015. He joined the Integrated Electromagnetics, Circuits, and Systems Lab (IECS) at the University of Virginia, VA, USA, in 2015, working under Professor Steven M. Bowers as a graduate researcher. He received his M.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Virginia in 2017, where he is currently pursuing his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering. His areas of research interest include RF electronics, mixed-signal and low-power integrated circuits, applied electromagnetics, and antenna design with application in wireless communication systems. His current research is focused on the design of temperature- and interference-robust ultra-low power wake-up receivers with nanowatt-level power consumption that operate at multi-GHz RF frequencies.

Minchang Cho

Minchang Cho received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, South Korea, in 2008 and 2010, respectively. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA. From 2010 to 2015, he was with Samsung Electronics, Hwaseong, South Korea, where he was involved in the low-power high-speed circuit design for DRAM products fabricated in 17- to 25-nm DRAM processes. In 2018, he was with Intel Labs, Hillsboro, OR, USA as a graduate research intern. His current research interests include low-power digital circuits design, energy-efficient hardware architectures for machine learning and signal processing, and autonomous ultra-small IoT sensor systems. He was a recipient of Hackers Bridge Scholarship (2015), National Graduate Scholarship of Korea (2015), Samsung Humantech Thesis Award (2019), and IEEE SSCS Predoctoral Achievement Award (2019-2020).

Sujan K. Gonugondla

Sujan K. Gonugondla received the Bachelors and Masters in Technology degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India, in 2014. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree under the guidance of Prof. Naresh Shanbhag in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA. His current research interests are in energy-efficient integrated circuits, and low complexity algorithms for machine learning systems, specifically algorithm hardware co-design for inference under resource-constraints.

Sujan K. Gonugondla is a recipient of the Dr. Ok Kyun Kim Fellowship 2018-19 and the M. E. Van Valkenburg Graduate Research Award 2019-20 from the ECE department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the ADI Outstanding Student Designer Award 2018. He has received Best Student Paper Awards in International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) in 2016, and International conference in Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) in 2018.

Hesam Sadeghi Gougheri

Hesam Sadeghi Gougheri received the B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from Isfahan University of Technology, Isfahan, Iran, in 2012, and the M.Sc. degree in microelectronics from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2014. His M.Sc. thesis was titled “Modeling and Improvement of Phase Noise in Ring Oscillators.” Then, he joined the Integrated Circuits and Systems Laboratory (ICSL) at the Pennsylvania State University (PSU), University Park, PA, USA, in 2015, where he is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering. His research interests include mm-wave and RF circuits design, power management circuits and low-power biomedical circuits. He is a recipient of the 2019 Outstanding Doctoral Research Award from the Electrical Engineering Department at the PSU, the 2019-2020 IEEE SSCS Predoctoral Achievement Award, the 2019 ISSCC Student Travel Grant Award, and the 2018 BioCAS Student Travel Grant Award.

Mahmoud Elhebeary

Mahmoud Elhebeary received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from the Electronics and Communications Engineering Department at Cairo University in Egypt in 2013 and 2015, respectively. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in electrical engineering at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) focusing on the design of wake-up receiver and power management circuits. His areas of research interest include analog/mixed-signal and low-power integrated circuits, PLL design, and power management circuits. He held multiple internship positions at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., San Diego, CA, USA, in 2016, 2017, and 2019, where he worked with various analog/mixed-signal design teams. 

Mr. Elhebeary received the UCLA Graduate Division Fellowship in 2015 and the Broadcom Foundation Fellowship from 2017 to 2018. He is also a recipient of the Broadcom Foundation Fellowship from 2018 to 2019. Recently he was awarded the “UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship Award” from 2019 to 2020, and the IEEE SSCS predoctoral achievement award (2019-2020). 

Kaizhe Guo

Kaizhe Guo was born in Jilin, China, in 1988. He received the B.Sc. degree in physics from Jilin University, Changchun, China, in 2010. and the M.Eng. degree in electromagnetic field and microwave technology from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China, in 2013. From 2013 to 2014, he was a Research Associate with Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Since 2014, He has been pursuing the Ph.D. degree with the MICAS Research Group of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium. His current research focuses on THz CMOS circuits for imaging communications.

He serves as a reviewer for the IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS and IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS I. He was a recipient of the 2019-2020 IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society Predoctoral Achievement Award. 

Tianyu Jia

Tianyu Jia received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China, in 2011 and 2014, respectively. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering with Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA. His Ph.D. thesis was focused on the advanced fine-grained clocking and power management techniques for microprocessors and machine learning accelerators.
He was a research interned at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in 2018 and at Apple Inc., CA in 2019. He is a recipient of the National Graduate Scholarship of China in 2012, the Richard Newton Young Fellow from Design Automation Conference in 2016, the Terminal Year Fellowship from Northwestern University in 2019 and the IEEE SSCS Predoctoral Achievement Award (2019-2020).

Xuyang Lu

Xuyang Lu is currently a 6th-year graduate student at Princeton University under Prof. Kaushik Sengupta. He becomes an IEEE student member since 2016. His publication, “Space-Time Modulated 71-to-76 GHz mm-Wave Transmitter Array for Physically Secure Directional Wireless Links”, is selected for publication in ISSCC 2020. His previous work, “an Integrated Optical Physically Unclonable Function Using Process Sensitive Sub-Wavelength Photonic Crystals in 65 nm CMOS”, was presented in ISSCC 2017. Mr. Lu was a recipient of the Analog Devices Outstanding Student Designer Award in 2018. His research projects involve the design of broadband transceivers with reconfigurable EM interfaces for mmWave MIMOs, radiating surfaces on Origami, space-time modulated transceiver architecture and Thz metasurface hologram.

Karim M. Megawer

Karim M. Megawer (S’16) received the B.Sc. (Hons.) and M.Sc. degrees in electronics and communications engineering from Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt, in 2013 and 2016, respectively. His MSc thesis was focused on design of low-power high-speed asynchronous SAR-assisted two-stage pipeline analog-to-digital converter (ADC) using ring amplifier. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree with the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA. From 2014 to 2016, he was an Analog/RF Design Engineer with Silicon Vision, Cairo. In 2017, he was with Xilinx, San Jose, CA, USA, and working on high-performance fractional-N frequency synthesizers. From June 2018 to December 2018 and May 2019 to July 2019, he was with Qualcomm, San Diego, CA, USA, and developing low-power low-jitter reference clock generators. He is currently a Research Assistant with the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. His research interests include developing techniques for frequency multiplying and fast startup crystal oscillators for low-jitter high-performance clock multipliers.

Mr. Megawer was a recipient of the IEEE SSCS Student Travel Grant Award in 2018, the Analog Devices Outstanding Student Designer Award in 2019, and the M. E. Van Valkenburg Graduate Research Award from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 2019.

Sining Pan

Sining Pan was born in China, in 1991. He received the B.Sc. degree in electronic engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 2013, and the M.Sc. (cum laude) degree in electrical engineering from the Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands, in 2016, where he is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree, focusing on the design of energy-efficient CMOS temperature sensors. He was a recipient of the ADI outstanding student designer award (2019) and the IEEE SSCS predoctoral achievement award (2019-2020). He has published four first-authored ISSCC papers by 2019, and has got one more accepted by ISSCC 2020. 

Bishnu Patra

Bishnu Patra  (S'11) received the B.Tech. degree in electrical and electronics engineering from the International Institute of Information Technology, Bhubaneswar, India, in 2013 and MSc degree in Electrical Engineering (Microelectronics) from Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands, in 2016, where he is currently pursuing the PhD degree, focusing on cryogenic RF Integrated circuits for quantum computing applications. From 2013 to 2014, he was a B.Sc. Researcher with the ELCA Department, Delft University of Technology. During his PhD, he worked as an RF & Mixed Signal IC Design Intern at Intel labs, Hillsboro, OR, USA from 2017 to 2018.

He was a recipient of the 2014 MSc Faculty scholarship by the Microelectronics Research Department of Delft University of Technology and IEEE SSCS Predoctoral Achievement Award (2019-2020). His current research interests include RF transmitters for qubit control, CMOS frequency synthesizers, design and modelling of microwave passive components at cryogenic temperatures. He serves a reviewer of IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I and IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices.

M. Reza Pazhouhandeh

M. Reza Pazhouhandeh (S’13) received the B.Sc. degree from the Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2012, and the M.Sc. degree from the University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran, in 2015, all in electrical engineering. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering, with a focus on design, development, and validation of mixed-signal neural recording and stimulation systems with high integration density, with the University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.

Mr. Pazhouhandeh was the recipient of Edward St. Rogers Graduate Scholarship from 2015 to 2017, and the CMC Brian L. Barge Award for excellence in microsystems integration in 2018. In 2017, he was a co-recipient of IEEE ISSCC Jack Kilby Award for Outstanding Student Paper. He serves as a Reviewer of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems, the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II, and the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

Mahmoud M. Pirbazari 

Mahmoud M. Pirbazari was born in Rasht (Iran) in 1987. He received his Bachelor and Master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tabriz (Iran) and the Urmia university (Iran) in 2010 and 2014, respectively. He joined AIC Lab at the University of Pavia in June 2017 as a researcher and enrolled on a PhD program by October of the same year. During his second degree at Urmia University, he worked on Analog Mixed-Signal Integrated circuits. For his final thesis, he designed a high-speed accurate gain-stage for high-speed pipeline ADCs. At AIC Lab, Mahmoud is working on millimeter-wave integrated circuits and he is involved in designing a frequency multiplier chain for the European H2020 project DREAM “D-band Radio Solution Enabling up to 100 Gbps reconfigurable Approach for Meshed beyond 5G networks”. The multiplication chain will provide a clean D-band LO by up-converting an X-band source signal. A conference paper presented at ESSCIRC 2019 describes part of the activity. Mahmoud has been the author/co-author of 5 journal papers, and two conference papers. Moreover, he has collaborated with the Microelectronics Journal and IEEE Access as a reviewer.

Athanasios Ramkaj

Athanasios Ramkaj received the degree in physics from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece, and the M.Sc. degree (cum laude) in electrical engineering from Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands, in 2012 and 2014, respectively. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree with the MICAS Research Group of KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium. From 2013 to 2014, he was a research intern in the Central Research & Development Department of NXP Semiconductors, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, working on GHz-range ADCs for communication systems. In 2019, he was a research/design intern with the High Speed Data Converters group of Analog Devices Inc., Wilmington, MA, USA, investigating bandwidth extension solutions for next generation RF ADCs. His research interests include high-speed/bandwidth high-resolution ADCs, analog/mixed-signal circuits for wireline/wireless networks, and ultra-wideband receiver front-ends. Mr. Ramkaj was the recipient of the IEEE SSCS Predoctoral Achievement Award 2019-2020. He serves as a Reviewer for the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits (JSSC), the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) and the MDPI Journal Electronics (Electronics).

Cheng Wang

Cheng Wang received his B.E. degree in Engineering Physics from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 2008. He received his M.S. degree in Radio Physics from China Academy of Engineering Physics (CAEP), Mianyang, China, in 2011. Later on, he has served as an assistant research fellow in CAEP from 2011 to 2015. Since 2015, he has been pursuing his Ph.D. degree at the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His research covers rotational spectroscopy, molecular clock, wireless communication, imaging and mixed-signal integrated circuits.​

Fei Wang

Fei Wang (S’14) received his B.S. degree in microelectronics from Fudan University, Shanghai, China, in 2014. He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA. His research interests include RF/mm-Wave integrated circuits and systems with an emphasis on the design of broadband linear and efficient power amplifiers for 5G applications.

Mr. Wang was the recipient of 2019-2020 IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS) Predoctoral Achievement Award, IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC) Best Student Paper Award (2nd place) in 2018, Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QIF) in 2018, IEEE ISSCC Analog Devices Inc. Outstanding Student Designer Award in 2017, IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S) PhD Student Sponsorship Initiative in 2016, Georgia Institute of Technology ECE Graduate Fellowship in 2014, 1st Prize in Shanghai Undergraduate Mathematical Competition in 2012 and the Tencent Innovation Scholarship at Fudan University in 2012.

He serves as a reviewer for IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques, and IEEE Microwave and Wireless Components Letters. He is a member of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS), IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S), and IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CAS).

Tzu-Fan Wu

Tzu-Fan Wu received the B.Sc. degree from National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, and the M.Sc. degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, all in electrical engineering. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in the department of electrical and computer engineering at University of Southern California. From 2009 to 2013, he was a member of the Analog IC Group at Metanoia Communications Inc., Hsinchu, Taiwan, working on mixed-signal circuits for various wireline communication products. His current research interests include high-performance data converters, delta-sigma modulators, time-assisted data conversion techniques, and digital signal processing.

He was a recipient of the 2019-2020 IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society Predoctoral Achievement Award. From 2015 to present, he serves as a technical reviewer for the IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS I/II, and IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS LETTERS.

Haosheng Zhang 

Haosheng Zhang was born in Jinhua, Zhejiang Province, China. He received the B.E. degree from Fudan University, Shanghai, China, in 2014 and the M.S. degree from Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan, in 2016. He is currently working towards the Ph.D. degree in the department of electrical and electronic engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology. His research interests include low noise power-efficient CMOS oscillator architecture, low-power high-resolution PLL, RF/mixed-signal circuits, and physics-and-IC interface such as atomic clock. He is a fellow of Japanese-government scholarship (MEXT) since 2014. He was a recipient or co-recipient of IEEE SSCS Japan Chapter Academic Research Award, Best Student Paper of Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium (RFIC 2019) and finally IEEE SSCS Predoctoral Achievement Award.

Wenda Zhao

Wenda Zhao received the B.S. degree from Peking University, Beijing, China, in 2016, and the M.S. degree in Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA, in 2019, where he is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree. His current research interests include power-efficient sensor readouts and data converters, as well as ultra-low-power compressive sensing techniques for IoT applications.

He received May-4th Scholarship in 2015 and the Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis Award in 2016, both from Peking University. He also received the Analog Devices Outstanding Student Designer Award in 2018 and the IEEE SSCS Predoctoral Achievement Award (2019-2020).