IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Winter 2022 - 39

Toshiba, Fujitsu lab, and NEC) were (and
actually still are) usually the wireless
devices and the wireless systems providers.
They, of course, have the leverage
to have technical transfer of the
joint research know-hows of mm-wave
CMOS transceivers. A spinoff company
from SONY and JRC is another impressive
achievement of this joint program.
The program's mission of Prof. Matsuzawa's
lab was exploring the CMOS
RF and analog baseband development
for building the 60-GHz indoor and
the 40-GHz outdoor transceivers. The
bottleneck of the design was the CMOS
device characteristics in mm-wave
60 GHz, which was still unknown at
that time to CMOS analog designers or
even to dedicated RF designers using
exotic technology. Prof. Matsuzawa's
lab built the device model of CMOS at
60 GHz from scratch and then developed
innovative RF macros, such as
oscillators, for the 60-GHz CMOS RF
transceiver. The first mm-wave CMOS
transceiver and a fully integrated
transceiver with a baseband chip were
published in IEEE Journal of Solid-State
Circuits (JSSC) in 2011 and at the IEEE
International Solid-State Circuits Conference
(ISSCC) in 2012, respectively,
which took nine years for Prof. Matsuzawa's
lab. Thereafter, it was impressive
that there were two JSSC papers
and five ISSCC papers on mm-wave
CMOS transceivers, and one JSSC
paper on RF macro published by Prof.
Matsuzawa's lab during 2011-2018.
I cannot recall if TITECH had so
many papers published previously
at the top notch of SSCS conferences,
such as ISSCC, which always require
that chips have been fabricated, tested,
and meet performance requirements.
It can, therefore, be conjectured that
Prof. Matsuzawa's lab's students must
have gone through the various disciplines
of the in-house-developed CMOS
RF analog design flow and design
methodology (design, simulation, layout,
postsim) before the design was
released to the foundry for fabrication.
Chip testing of mm-wave RF macros,
analog macros, and RF analog front-/
rear-end systems were not trivial, particularly
when students themselves
had to model the device in mm-wave
frequency initially before the design.
Students who graduated from this lab
had the caliber to work for the design
industry seamlessly. Some of those
who received degrees from this lab
also found faculty positions at other
leading international universities.
A system-chip oriented research lab
that asked to design actual chips and
test the RF/analog macros and associated
systems was, therefore, formed
naturally at TITECH. The course flow
of chip design methodology, such as
device modeling and mixed mode circuit
designs simulation, was proposed
by Prof. Matsuzawa at TITECH in 2014,
which brought noticeable attention
and well received in Japan.
Prof. Matsuzawa has been one
of the most successful researchers
exploring CMOS for mm-wave transceiver's
applications. He was asked to
give lectures, invited talks, and panel
discussions at
international conferences.
He took all chances to advocate
for CMOS for mm-wave applications
[3]. Of course, he is still a welcome
invited speaker of short courses and
tutorials on ADC and analog circuit
designs [4] (Figure 2).
Prof. Matsuzawa always encourages
his colleagues and his students
to participate the major SSCS
events [5] (Figure 3) and conferences.
He supported the exchange/visits/
seminars of his lab with other labs
because he felt that social networking
helped to understand, learn from
each other, and to establish longterm
friendships in SSCS. Our NTU
labs had at least five activities with
Prof. Matsuzawa's lab (2007-2012) [2],
[4]-[6], [8] before I retired in 2013.
The five activities were invited talks
[4], [8], research seminars [2], [7], and
student social events [6] (Figure 4),
which were organized and sponsored
by either NTU labs or Prof. Matsuzawa's
lab in Japan or in Taiwan.
" SSCS Tokyo Chapter and SSCS Taipei
Chapter Joint Research Seminar " was
chaired by SSCS Tokyo Chapter Chair
Dr. Furuyama and Vice Chair Prof.
Matsuzawa in 2007 [7] (Figure 5).
Forty years of Prof. Matsuzawa's
career in the industry (1978-2003)
and in academia (2003-2018) reflects
the evolution of technologies, ad -
vancement of device integration, and,
finally, availability of low-cost, longoperation,
smart consumer electronic
products that he has dedicated
and contributed. Prof. Matsuzawa is
FIGURE 3: " A-SSCC TPC Meeting NTU Visit, " NTU campus, Taipei, Taiwan, November 2009 [5].
IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE WINTER 2022
39

IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Winter 2022

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