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Alumnus Venumadhav Bhagavatula (PhD '13) Wins
Best Paper Award at the 2014 IEEE RFIC Symposium

Alumnus Venu Bhagavatula (PhD '13) has won a best paper award at the 2014 IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits (RFIC) Symposium in Tampa Bay, Fla. Out of 100 publications at the conference, his paper is one of three to receive the best paper award.

His paper titled, “A compact 24-54 GHz CMOS band-pass distributed amplifier for high fractional bandwidth signal amplification,” applies Norton Transforms recursively to reduce the total inductance, and ultimately allow a practical small-form factor circuit amenable for on-chip implementation. The 40nm CMOS chip has a measured channel bandwidth of 30GHz, which represents one the widest fractional bandwidth amplifiers reported to date for a given silicon area (0.15mm2). This is one of several chips that Dr. Bhagavatula fabricated for his PhD thesis. He conducted this work in UW’s FAST Lab with his faculty advisor Chris Rudell.

An aspect of Dr. Bhagavatula's PhD thesis focused on extremely broadband silicon implementations of mmWave circuits and systems for wireless, imaging, and radar applications. His work explored practical low-power, ultra-broad bandwidth solutions in standard CMOS technologies which occupied minimal silicon area. A common circuit building block to realize a broad frequency response in discrete-component form, is the use of Distributed Amplifiers (DA). Integration in silicon of broadband DAs has proven challenging because of the need for numerous high value inductors which traditionally require a prohibitively large amount of silicon area.

Dr. Bhagavatula is now a senior staff IC design engineer at Samsung Electronics in San Jose, Calif, where he is currently working on the design of radio frequency integrated circuits in advanced silicon CMOS processes for next generation wireless systems.

More Information

Venu Bhagavatula's web page
PDF link to paper
Presentation slides
2014 IEEE RFIC Symposium website
Future Analog Systems Technologies (FAST) Lab

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