IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Summer 2021 - 68

PEOPLE
In Step With Po-Hsuan Wei
Coffee Connoisseur and Rising Young Professional Star
P
Po-Hsuan Wei, IEEE Solid-State Circuits
Society (SSCS) member, is an
integral part of the SSCS Young Professionals
(YP) team. She received
her B.S. degree in electrical engineering
from National Taiwan University,
Taipei, Taiwan, in 2013 and
her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical
engineering from Stanford University,
Stanford, California, in 2016
and 2021, respectively. She previously
held internship positions at
Cisco Systems and Xilinx Inc. Wei is
the recipient of a number of awards,
including the Analog Devices Outstanding
Student Designer Award,
Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship,
and Accel Innovation Scholars
(now Accel Leadership Program).
Her Ph.D. degree work focused
on developing an analog and mixedsignal
layout generation flow that
leverages digital place-and-route
tools, amortizes the setup cost with
reusable primitives, and prunes layout
candidates using time-efficient
layout quality surrogates. This methodology
is validated with a generated
4× time-interleaved successive
approximation analog-to-digital converter,
a StrongARM comparator, and
a voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO)
in 16-nm FinFET CMOS. The silicon
measurement results of the VCO
closely track the simulation, showing
only 6% in the maximal oscillation
frequency degradation from its
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSSC.2021.3089086
Date of current version: 25 August 2021
68 SUMMER 2021
Wei with Candi after a horseback riding class at
Stanford. (Phones and cameras were not allowed
while riding.)
manual counterpart, verifying the
methodology from netlist to silicon.
Wei was previously on the SSCS
Webinars for Young Excellence (WYE)
Committee and currently serves on
the SSCS Technical Webinar Committee.
She has been the interviewer and
organizer for several WYEs, including
" To Academia or to Industry, That Is
the Question, " by Prof. Kofi Makinwa
of Delft University of Technology and
Dr. Linus Lu, chief solutions officer
at PieceMakers Technology, Inc. The
webinar attracted more than 200
attendees and contributed to the IEEE
SSCS YPs' winning the 2020 YP Hall
of Fame award. " My takeaway from
interviewing Prof. Makinwa and Dr.
Lu is that we need to allocate time
and energy to learn new knowledge
or skills; allowing our minds to be
always occupied by familiar fields or
busy work will soon lead to complacency,
regardless of where one is at, "
Wei said.
Wei credits SSCS membership with
FUN FACTS ABOUT
PO-HSUAN WEI
■ Wei loves everything about coffee.
■ She was on the departmental badminton
and basketball teams and took
as many physical education classes as
she could while at Stanford.
■ She served as a high-intensity
interval training instructor on a workout
website founded by Stanford
postdoctoral researchers during the
pandemic quarantine.
helping her stay current on the latest
technological trends, obtaining career
insights, and build communities
that
inspired and encouraged her
to grow. " I have acquired knowledge
from the SSCS webinar program and
been guided by the speakers of the
WYE programs that I have worked on, "
she explained. She also credits the
SSCS Women in Circuits Committee
for informative and insightful events.
Wei overcomes fears by taking
a risk each day, from small challenges,
like jumping to the next hold
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IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Summer 2021

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