IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Spring 2017 - 93

IEEE N E WS

Magazine Associate Editor Marcel Pelgrom Receives
IEEE Gustav Robert Kirchhoff Award

The recipient of the 2017 IEEE Gustav
Robert Kirchhoff Award is Marcel Pelgrom. The long-time IEEE Solid-State
Circuits Society member and IEEE
Solid-State Circuits Magazine associate
editor was recognized for "seminal
contributions to systematic analysis
of random offsets in semiconductor
devices and their impact on circuits."
This is the first time that a recipient
of this award is from the commercial electronics industry. The award
was presented at the 2017 International Solid-State Circuits Conference
(ISSCC) in San Francisco, California,
at the plenary session on Monday,
6 February.
Pelgrom is known for his formulation
of the random variation (mismatch)
behavior between two otherwise identical components. His theories on random component variation let to the
Pelgrom law, which is widely recognized as a critical enabler of design
efficiency in analog chip design. His
1989 prediction still holds. The formulation of the Pelgrom model has
allowed applications to other devices,
such as bipolar devices, resistors,
and capacitors.
Pelgrom said that it all started with
his first assignment at Philips research
where he was asked to develop a
sense amp for a memory. He laid out
the circuit, but the digital designers
complained that the circuit did not
fit, asking him to turn one half of the
amp by 90°. To characterize the effect
of rotation, he started measuring MOS
transistors. Pelgrom rebuilt his measurement set-up three times before
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSSC.2017.2689418

Date of publication: 21 June 2017

2017 Kirchhoff Award recipient Marcel Pelgrom (left) receives his award from IEEE President
Karen Bartelson at ISSCC 2017.

it finally produced reliable results. In
time, useful results came out of his
project, and he was pushed to come
up with more than just data, but the
development of a general model.
"Is this prize the recognition for a
single mismatch paper, for the ADC
work and books, for the columns in IEEE
Solid-State Circuits Magazine, the many
classes at university and industry, or
the many papers, forums, and conferences like this, I do not know," Pelgrom
said in his acceptance speech at ISSCC,
"But I do know that each time there
was always one constant factor: you,
my audience. You were always there to
read my stuff, listen to my talks, and
smile politely at my bad jokes."
Pelgrom is a consultant with Pelgrom Consult in The Netherlands.

After earning degrees from Arnhem
Polytechnical School and the University of Twente, he began his career
in 1979 at Philips Research, which
later became part of NXP. He retired
from NXP in 2013 and still regularly
teaches classes at TU Delft, the University of Twente, and Stanford University. He is an honorary professor
at KU Leuven. Pelgrom has also written three books on AD conversion.
The IEEE Gustav Robert Kirchhoff
Award, named after Gustav Robert
Kirchhoff, is presented to individuals
or multiple recipients for outstanding
contributions to the fundamentals of
any aspect of electronic circuits and
systems that has a long-term significance or impact.
-Abira Sengupta

IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE

s p r i n g 2 0 17

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