Professor Asad Abidi Develops A Universal Chip for Cell Phones

A Universal Chip for Cell Phones

News : A universal radio antenna receives all kinds of signals traveling through the air  some strong, some weak  and all at different frequencies.

In order to convert every analog signal to digital signals, a chip would require an analog to digital converter that burns “several hundred watts” of power, says Prof. Abidi far too much for a portable device.

Therefore, his team used a modified version of SDR that exploits the fact that not all incoming signals need to be converted at once. People are usually interested in only one channel at a time, he says, such as using Wi Fi or talking via a specific frequency on a cellular network.

So Abidi research group incorporated a type of device – previously used only in obscure applications into their circuit that’s able to examine the vast range of radio frequencies, pick out the band of interest, and emphasize it, while de emphasizing the others. In essence, this device – what engineers call a “wideband anti aliasing device” – is able to access the spectrum and focus on a single band, so that only small amounts of analog information need to be converted to a digital signal. By building band choosing into the circuit, the analog to digital conversion takes only tens of milliwatts of power, Professor Abidi says.

Their advance, he notes, starts from discovering the potential for this previously under used wideband anti aliasing device and integrating it with other wide band circuit components to build a complete receiver. “The concept had been around for a while,” he explains, “but no one saw how powerful it would be for software defined radio applications.”

“A chip that sorts out the incoming signal such as Prof. Abidi’s is the type of technology that could help SDR become a reality in cell phones”, says Bruce Fette, chief scientist of communication networks at General Dynamics C4 Systems, a company that builds large software defined radio equipment for military use. And the idea of SDR is becoming more attractive to the mobile device industry, he says, because it provides so much more flexibility in the functions of a single device, ranging from using the same cell phone all over the world, to having a PDA unlock your car door.

Prof. Abidi says there’s still more research to be done before the chip is ready for commercial applications. For one thing, his team has only solved the problem of converting incoming analog to digital signals over such a wide range of frequencies.

Wireless devices must also transmit an outgoing analog signal. A truly universal chip will need to convert outgoing signals from digital to analog form over a similarly wide range of frequencies. Still, his team has solved the most difficult part of the problem by addressing the receiver, Prof. Abidi says. Incoming signals are much more complicated because, with a receiver, “you’re listening to the whole world,” he says, whereas “with transmitters, you’re not contending with unwanted signals.”

Prof. Abidi and his team hope to smooth out the remaining technical issues with their universal chip by late summer. From there, the work of other researchers who design the digital processor and software for SDR will come into play, he says. Professor Abidi estimates that all these pieces will come together for a prototype sometime next year. And, he says, a universal chip could be in handheld wireless gadgets within three to five years.

Source : http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=16756&ch=infotech
Information: (AA) research group comes with a single chip advanced mobile phone
Note : (AA) UCLA research group = Asad Abidi research group at UCLA More
Information: http://www.icsl.ucla.edu/aagroup/
 
Professor Asad Abidi

Asad A. Abidi received the B.Sc. (with Honors) degree from Imperial College, London, U.K. in 1976, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1978 and 1981, respectively.

He was at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, from 1981 to 1984 as a Member of Technical Staff in the Advanced LSI Development Laboratory. Since 1985, he has been with the Electrical Engineering Department of the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is Professor.

He was a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Hewlett Packard Laboratories in 1989. His research interests are in CMOS RF design, data high speed analog integrated circuit design, conversion, and other techniques of analog signal processing.

Dr. Abidi was the Program Secretary for the International Solid State Circuits Conference from 1984 to 1990, and General Chairman of the Symposium on VLSI Circuits in 1992. He was Secretary of the IEEE Solid state Circuits Council from 1990 to 1991. From 1992 to 1995, he was Editor of the IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits.

Dr. Abidi received an IEEE Millennium Medal. He has received the 1988 TRW Award for Innovative Teaching and the 1997 IEEE Donald G. Fink Award. He was a corecipient of the Best Paper Award at the 1995 European Solid state Circuits Conference, the Jack Kilby Best Student Paper Award at the 1996 International Solid state Circuits Conference (ISSCC), the Jack Raper Award for Outstanding Technology Directions Paper at the 1997 ISSCC, and the Design Contest Award at the 1998 Design Automation Conference, and received an Honorable Mention at the 2000 Design Automation Conference. 

Office: 53 143, Eng. IV, UCLA

Homepage: http://www.icsl.ucla.edu/aagroup/aaa

Biography: http://www.icsl.ucla.edu/aagroup/cv.html

Students:
Abbas Amirichimeh (Ph.D. Student)
Abbas Amirichimeh received his B.Sc. (with Honors) in Electrical Engineering with emphasis on Microelectronics from Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran, and ranked 4th in the class of 1988. During his bachelors program, he worked on several projects including a “Low Frequency Digitized Sweep Generator”. Abbas was with the Air Force for 5 years working on a G&C system before he joined Center for Advanced Electron Devices and Systems (CAEDS), University of Texas at Arlington in 1994 where he worked as a research assistant on 0.5 micron GaAs MESFETs and passive components at the device level and designed several monolithic wideband amplifiers. He received his Masters degree in GaAs MMIC circuits and technology with G.P.A 4.00 in 1995. Abbas was with Intel High Performance Architecture Group (IAG) in Portland, Oregon, from 1996 to 2000 working as an integral member of High-Speed Circuit Group (Fireball) in Pentium 4 development team (Willamette) where he developed and designed the Scheduler Scoreboard Unit (SSU) Fireball critical circuitries running at 2X the frequency of the rest of the chip, custom circuits and layouts running at 3GHz+ on Intel’s 0.18 micron process. Abbas joined Broadcom Networking Business Unit, Irvine, California, in 2000 and has been designing 10Gb/S SERDES chips since then. He joined UCLA Integrated Circuits and Systems Lab (ICSL) in fall 2002 where he is working toward his Ph.D. degree in the field of Analog Circuit Design. His research interests are RF, Analog and Mixed-Mode Circuits.
Abbas has been a member of IEEE since 1987 and has published a paper in “2000 Intel Design and Technology Conference (IDTC)” on “High frequency on-die interconnect modeling”, and a paper in  “1996 International Conference on GaAs Manufacturing Technology,” on “Electrostatic discharge protection for GaAs devices and MMIC circuits”.
 
 

Rahim Bagheri (Ph.D. Student)

Rahim Bagheri received the B.Sc. (Ranked First) in EE and M.S. in BioElectric both from Sharif University of Technology,Tehran,Iran in 1997 and 1999 respectively. He joined UCLA in 1999, studying toward his Ph.D. and was a Graduate Student Researcher in MOSFET Research Lab (UCLA,1999-2000) working on deep submicron CMOS devices. He was at Valence Semiconductor, Irvine, as a senior design member of wireless group(2000-2001). His current research is the design of High Efficiency Linear RF Transmitters in ICSL, UCLA.
Rahim is the recipient of Gold Medal in national physics olympiad (IRAN) and Honorable Mention Diploma in the XXIV International Physics Olympiad,Virginia, USA. 
Homepage: www.icsl.ucla.edu/~rahim
 
 

Rodney Chandler (M.S. Student)
Rodney Chandler received the B.E. (Electrical and Electronic) from the University of Queensland, Australia in 1998. From 2001-2003, Rodney worked for Cisco Systems Wireless Networking Business Unit (formerly Radiata) in Sydney, Australia, designing Analog to Digital Converters (ADC) and analog baseband filters. This work resulted in two patents related to design of ADCs. He joined the Integrated Circuits and Systems Lab (ICSL) at UCLA in Fall 2003, and is currently studying for the M.Sc. degree. His research interests are high speed Analog-to-Digital converters, wireless transceivers for high speed networks, and analog filters. Rodney plans to continue to the Ph.D. degree, after completing the M.Sc.

Jae-Hong Chang (Visiting Scholar)
Jae-Hong Chang was born in Republic of Korea. He received the B.Sc. degree in Electronic engineering at Kyungpook national university, Daegue, Korea, in 1998 and the M.S. degree in EECS at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Korea in 2000, respectively. He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree in EECS at KAIST. He was at RF CMOS TEAM in ETRI, Daejeon, as a part time engineer (2000-2002). His current research interests include the RF CMOS IC design, passive and active device modeling and RF MEMS. He received the Silver Prize in 9th 2003 Samsung Humantec Thesis Award.

Saeed Chehrazi (Ph.D. Student)

Saeed Cheharzi received his B.Sc. from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran in 2001 and his M.S. from University of California, Los Angeles in 2004. His research interests are RF, Analog and Mixed Mode Circuit Design.
Saeed was the Software Committee chair of the International Millennium Seminar on Electrical Engineering (IMSEE) held at Sharif Univ. of Tech. on March 1-3, 2000. He received the UCLA Graduate Division Fellowship for Fall 2001.

Mohammad Esmaeil Heidari (Ph.D. Student)

Mohammad Esmaeil Heidari received his B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering in 1995 and MS degree in electrical engineering in 1997 both from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. From 1997 to 2000, he was with Emad Semiconductor Co., designing CMOS analog IC for high precision data converters, analog filters and power amplifiers. He joined Valence Co. in 2000 and was involved in the design of analog sections of Codec for telephony applications.  He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Integrated Circuits and Systems Lab (ICSL), University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests are in the area of low power CMOS RF transceivers, low phase noise Phase Locked Loops and Delta-Sigma data converters. 

Aly Ismail (Ph.D. Student)

Aly Ismail received his B.Sc. and M.S.degrees both in electrical engineering from Cairo University, Giza, Egypt, in 1998 and 2000 respectively. Since September 2000, he has been with the University of California, Los Angeles as a Graduate Student Researcher. In January 2002, he joined Conexant Systems where he was working on the design of BICMOS RF circuits for cellular systems.
He is currently working toward his Ph.D. degree in integrated circuits and systems, his research is involved in the design of Ultra Wide-Band (UWB) receivers in CMOS technology. 

Minjae Lee (Ph.D. Student)

Minjae Lee received his B.Sc. and M.S. degrees both in electrical engineering from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea in 1998 and 2000 respectively.
He was a consultant with GCT semiconductor, Inc., and Silicon Image Inc., designing analog circuits for wireless communication and digital signal processing blocks for Gigabit Ethernet. He joined Silicon Image Inc., in 2001, developing Serial ATA product. Since 2003,  he has been working toward the Ph.D. degree in the field of analog and mixed mode circuit design at ICSL, UCLA.

Ahmad Mirzaei (Ph.D. Student)

Ahmad Mirzaei was born in Tabriz, Iran, in 1978. He received the B.Sc. and M.S. degrees (with honors) both in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran in 2000 and 2002 respectively. He was working in Novin Rayaneh and Emad Company in designing of high speed data-converters and  RF frequency synthesizers. He is currently studying toward his PhD. in Electrical Engineering at University of California at Los Angeles. His main research interests include high speed analog integrated circuit design, high speed low-voltage ADCs, RF integrated circuit design and High-Frequency Gm-C Filters. He was the winner of Silver Medal in National Mathematical Olympiad in 1996, and was the first rank in Student Olympiad in Electronics in Iran in 2002. He was also the first rank in National University Entrance exam in Iran in 2000.

Sohrab Samadian (Ph.D. Student)

Sohrab Samadian received his B.Sc. in electrical engineeing from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran in 1998 and his M.Sc. from UCLA in 2002 where he’s pursuing his PhD degree. His research interests are RF and analog circuit design and low power frequency demodulators. He worked on a direct conversion receiver for Bluetooth and especially on a low power demodulator for his Masters. Sohrab is currently with Sequoia Communications, San Diego working on 3G transceivers. Sohrab is the recepient of the design contest award at International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design, 2002 and the design contest award of the 16th International conference on VLSI Design, India, 2003 for his work on low power GFSK demodulator. He also received APSIH’s award of excellence in engineering education in April 2003.
Zheming Li (Ph.D. Student)
Shervin Moloudi (Ph.D. Student)

Alumni: Hooman Darabi (Ph.D., 1999)
Hooman Darabi was born in Tehran, Iran in 1972. He received the B.Sc. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran in 1994 and 1996 respectively. He received the Ph.D. degree from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1999. He is currently a principle scientist in Broadcom Corporation, El Segundo, CA. His interests include analog and RF IC design for wireless communications. 

Emad Hegazi (Ph.D., 2002)

Emad Hegazi received his M.S. from Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt, in 1998 and his Ph.D. from University of California, Los Angeles in 2002. He joined UCLA Integrated Circuits and Systems Lab. in 1998. His Ph.D. research was focused on Fractional-N Frequency Synthesizer Design. His research interests are Low Phase noise VCO design,  Nonlinear Circuits, Frequency Synthesizer design and optimization methods. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Ain Shams University, Egypt.
Emad is the recipient of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society Pre-doctoral Fellowship award (2001-2002) and ADI Outstanding Student Designer Award from Analog Devices Inc., 2000. He has received the UCLA Graduate Division Fellowship for 1999 and the Outstanding Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering Award from UCLA.
Homepage: http://www.icsl.ucla.edu/~emad

Ali Karimi (Engineer Degree, 2001)

Ali Karimi was born in Tehran, Iran in March 1974. He received the B.Sc. and M.S. degrees (highest honors) in electrical engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 1995 and 1997, respectively. He received the Engineer Degree from the University of California, Los Angeles in March 2001 focusing on researches about 2.4GHz WLAN and 2.1GHz WCDMA receivers. His area of interests include analog IC’s for communication either wireless or optical applications.
Homepage: http://www.icsl.ucla.edu/~karimi

Daniel Q. Sun (Ph.D., 2004)

Daniel Qicheng Sun received B.E. in 1989 from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, and M.Eng. in 1996 from National University of Singapore, Singapore. He is now pursuing the Ph.D. degree in eletrical engineering at University of California, Los Angeles. In 1989-1993, he was with the National Lab on Digital Microwave Communications at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. In 1996, he joined Data Storage Insitute, Singapore, where he was engaged in the circuits design of the first MDFE read channel. Since 1997, he has been a Graduate Student Researcher at UCLA. His research interests include high-speed mixed-signal IC design, HDD read channels, signal processing and communications. 

Andrea Xotta (Visiting Scholar, 2002)
Andrea Xotta received his “Laurea” degree (summa cum laude) in electrical engineering from University of Padova, Padova, Italy in 1999, where he is currently a Ph.D. Student. His Ph.D. research activity is focused on development of analog turbo decoder for Hard Disk (HD) applications. His research interests include continuous-time filters, sampled-data analog filters and analog turbo decoders. 
Asad Abidi Group Members

Kashif Asad Ahmed
Farbod Behbahani (Ph.D. )
Anthony Brewster
Jing Cao
Patrick Chan
Glenn Chang
James Yung Chang
Jeffrey Chang
Paul Jinyung Chang
Michael Choi (Ph.D.)
William Colleran
Siavash Fallahi
Ramon Gomez
Koichi Hoshino
Karapet Khanoyan
Jikun Kim
Kwang-Young Kim
Haruo Kobayashi
Alexandre Rudolf Karl
Jaesup Lee
John Cumming Leete
Yoan-Tsang Liaw
Danny Daysang Loh
David John Loh
Patrick Pai
Hui Pan (Ph.D.)
Jacob Jude Rael
Ahmadreza Rofougaran (Ph.D.)
Maryam Rofougaran
Thomas Spargo
Wade Jay Stone
Shahrzad Tadjpour (Ph.D.)
Wee-Guan Tan
Chun Sei Tsai
Tyson Tuttle
Myles H. Wakayama
Yun-Ti Wang
Chun-Kai Wei
Joanne Joh-Mei Wu

Information as publishde by Prof. Asad Abidi group in 2005