IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Winter 2016 - 76

SSCS DL Ullrich Pfeiffer Visits New York Chapter

IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society
(SSCS) Distinguished Lecturer (DL)
Ullrich Pfeiffer, professor at Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Germany, visited the SSCS-New York
Chapter on 17 April 2015 to give the
lecture "Silicon-Based Circuits and
Systems at the Terahertz Frontier."
The lecture was held at Columbia
University and attracted over 30 faculty members and students.

Abstract
The push for novel applications in the
sub-mm-wave region of the electromagnetic spectrum has raised the bar
on RF circuit design and characterization. Continued device scaling enables
circuits to operate at frequencies so
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSSC.2015.2495886
Date of publication: 21 January 2016

DL ullrich pfeiffer gives a lecture at the sscs-New York chapter.

high that contactless wafer testing
(in free space) is the last resort. This
talk will summarize this frontier.
It follows practical CMOS and SiGe
BiCMOS design examples including 0.5-THz high-power oscillators,

subharmonically operated receivers
and transmitters up to 0.8 THz, and
broadband direct detectors for active
imagers running well beyond 1 THz.
-Abira Sengupta

SSCS Distinguished Lecturer Willy Sansen Visits Poland Chapter

The IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society
(SSCS) Poland Chapter organized a
short course given by SSCS Distinguished Lecturer Prof. Willy Sansen.
The two-day course, "Circuits with
Resistor and Capacitor Cancellation: Design Techniques to Enhance
High-Frequency Performance without Increased Power Consumption,"
was held 12-13 October 2015 at
the AGH University of Science and
Technology in Cracow, Poland. The
event attracted a vast array of over
40 attendees, including IC designers
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSSC.2015.2495887
Date of publication: 21 January 2016

W I N T E R 2 0 16

from various companies, university
researchers, Ph.D. and M.Sc. students.
On the first day of the short course,
Prof. Sansen explained an amplifier
design procedure using EKV/BSIM6
models. He showed attendees how to
find an optimum operating region of a
transistor using inversion coefficient
for the best compromise between
speed and power consumption. Noise
minimization and distortion cancelation methods were also discussed.
The participants were satisfied with
informative lectures and exercises
on the amplifier design with positive feedback and techniques based
on negative resistance/capacitance.

IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE

Many of the presented circuit examples were elaborated in bipolar technology and are being used again today
in CMOS designs.
The second day followed with lectures focused on the compensation
techniques in operation amplifiers
and the design of multistage operational amplifiers. The presented polezero cancelation techniques allow a
significant reduction in power consumption; however, some of them,
such as feedforward, require a particular attention not to degenerate the
time response. During the lectures,
excellent examples of high-end amplifiers with different tricks were

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Winter 2016