IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Summer 2014 - 44

My Two Years in Pavia
I have probably been the first of the young engineers from other universities, cited by Professor Baccarani in his article, to spend a period
of training at the group of Rinaldo Castello at the University of Pavia.
The term training is actually overly simplistic to refer to two years,
which have been among the most rewarding and useful from both
professional and human standpoint of my, now not-so-short, career
as an engineer.
In the early nineties the research group in which I'm still working
today, at the Politecnico di Milano, was a leading school in the area
of nuclear electronics (see the issue of Solid-State Circuits Magazine of
Summer 2012), but did not carry out any research in the field of analog
integrated electronics, in particular for mass applications such as communications where the CMOS was becoming the dominant technology.
With a far-sighted decision, I was asked by my advisor to spend a few
months in Pavia under the supervision of Rinaldo, to import that kind of
culture in our school.
For this reason, in the April of 1994 I took the train from Milano to
Pavia to meet Rinaldo. I had read many of his works, and I remember that I had to pluck up courage to introduce myself to him. Rinaldo
was very informal and brought me in his research group, which was
already large, including many young people who were destined to future
distinguished careers in academia and industry; some of them have
contributed to this issue. The research at that time was mainly about
filters and A/D converters, while discussions about CMOS circuits for
RF applications have just started. At the beginning I was not familiar
with these topics, and I often feared to be a burden for people that
were already very experienced on these subjects. However, since the
first day I was greeted amicably, and all of them where always willing
to help and give me advice whenever I needed it. I can compare that
period to the days of my university studies, I had the feeling to either
learn new ideas almost every day or to see well known concepts under
a different perspective. The few months became two years. I remember
as particularly interesting the lunch time I use to spend with Rinaldo and
the other people of the group. Being very busy, Rinaldo was often late,
sometimes even two hours late. I was willing to endure hunger not to
miss those moments when Rinaldo, regularly used to propose solutions
to our design problems, to present new ideas that he had in the morning,
mixing everything with a discussion about the news of the day. Another
opportunity for an off-line discussion occasionally took place at the end
of the day. We both lived near Milan, and sometimes Rinaldo gave me
a ride on his way home. During the trip, often he illustrated his ideas by
designing circuits with the finger on the windshield, while driving on
the highway.
Apart from these, of course I had weekly meetings with Rinaldo. In those
moments I always appreciated his availability, the ability to go straight to
the heart of the problem by removing unnecessary details, and his great
creativity in proposing original solutions. I exploit every day many of the
things I've learned in those days. Above all I'd like to point out his remarkable scientific rigor and his seriousness in presenting the results, a quality
not always found in such a competitive environment.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSSC.2014.2327710
Date of publication: 26 August 2014

su m m e r 2 0 14

IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE

Figure S2: Polytecnic of Milan. (Photo courtesy of Polytecnic of
Milan.)

In the following years, after I left Pavia, I have been lucky to work
again with Rinaldo in some occasions, for example within the project
on reconfigurable terminals mentioned in the article, and especially I've
been able to benefit from his suggestions and the discussions we often
had, especially in the decade of development of RF circuits. Incidentally,
in my opinion, many of the considerations that he usually shares with his
students, colleagues and friends, if put in a form of papers could become
important contributions to literature.
In conclusion, Rinaldo is not only a bright example of great scientific passion, creativity and rigor, which has achieved a wealth of wellknown results in the field of microelectronics. He has also contributed
to the dissemination of the culture of analog design in other Italian Universities, by hosting a number of people coming from different school
and teaching them the secrets of this art. During my following activity I
have always kept in mind his example.
-Carlo Samori
About the Author
Carlo Samori (M'98-SM'08) was born in 1966. He received the Ph.D.
degree in Electrical Engineering and Communications at the Politecnico
di Milano, Italy, in 1995.
Since 2002, he has been an Associate Professor of electrical engineering with Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy. He initially worked on
high-speed low-noise front-end circuits for photodetectors, and then in
the area of design and analysis of integrated circuits for communications
both in bipolar and in CMOS technology. Among his works, he contributed to a time-variant theory of phase noise generation in LC-tuned VCO,
he collaborated to the design of several low phase noise VCO in bipolar
and CMOS technology. He has contributed to the design of fractional
and integer-N PLLs for multistandard WLAN applications. From 1997 to
2002, he was Consultant with Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ, USA. Currently,
his research interests are frequency synthesizers and RF circuits. He is
the coauthor of approximately 100 papers in international journals and
conferences. In 2007 he published, as a coauthor, the book Integrated
Frequency Synthesizers for Wireless Systems (Cambridge University
Press). He is a member of the Technical Program Committee for the IEEE
International Solid-State Circuits Conference and the European Solid-State
Circuits Conference.

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