IEEE International MTT Symposia

Prof. Asad Abidi, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles

Plenary Speakers

RF Control Systems for the Future of Quantum Computing
Dr. Oliver Dial, IBM

Quantum computing is at an inflection point. Three years ago, we had the first instances of quantum computers performing calculations that could not be directly simulated. This year, we believe quantum advantage will be demonstrated: verifiable examples of quantum computers performing calculations faster or more accurately than is possible on classical computer. However, unlocking the full power of quantum computing will require large-scale fault tolerant quantum computers: computers able to run hundreds of millions of operations on thousands of qubits with no errors. Advances in the error correcting codes that, in principle, make this possible have greatly reduced the overhead of such a machine, to the extent we now believe it will be possible by 2029. However, even with these advances, these machines will have tens of thousands of qubits. Controlling them will require the rapid maturation of quantum control systems, demanding new, dense, reliable, and low power microwave signal generators, wiring, and passives to be designed, tested, and manufactured in the next few years. I will discuss how we foresee this evolving, and some of the requirements these RF control systems will have to achieve.

RF-CMOS at 25: Some Unique Concepts that Endure
Prof. Asad Abidi, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles

It would be wrong to view the dramatic rise of CMOS in mass-produced RF electronics as merely a way to lower costs or integrate more on a chip. CMOS introduced unprecedented circuits and architectures, enabling fine-grained calibration, substantial improvements in blocker tolerance, monolithic replacement of oscillator modules, and digital closer to the antenna. Today, complete RF-CMOS transceivers (except for a front-end module) are but a small piece of large mixed-signal systems-on-a-chip. The Internet is accessed at high speeds primarily through wireless connections. IoT devices are gradually proliferating in both built and remote environments. Wireless sensing is everywhere. This presentation will select a handful of concepts and describe, in accessible technical terms, what makes them endure.

Bram Nauta, University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands

Technical Lecture

Modern Receiver Architectures: mixer-first, N-path, and “no-gain” architectures
Bram Nauta, University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands

In a classical receiver, the first thing designers do is add amplification immediately after the chip’s RF input. This is usually done with a low-noise amplifier (LNA) and is often followed by selectivity and a mixer. This way, the mixer may be noisy, and its design becomes easier. In the current overcrowded radio spectrum, however, adding the first amplifier may result in significant distortion products at the LNA output. These cannot be removed anymore. Therefore, mixer-first architectures have emerged as a candidate for the first circuit after the chip’s RF input. These architectures do not use a low-noise amplifier but instead use a low-loss passive mixer. These passive mixers exhibit very good linearity and offer the option of narrow-band RF filtering at the mixer input. This makes the mixer-first receiver a good candidate for applications where interference is a challenge. The RF filtering is achieved by exploiting the mixer in a so-called N-path filter, which is a filtering technique from forgotten times. New ideas such as higher-order filtering and passive voltage gain via capacitor stacking will also be presented in this lecture. An outlook of fully passive receivers, even without active linear amplification, is also given as a possible future direction.

Sunday Workshops

Title	Organizers
Advanced RF to sub-THz frequency generation: oscillators, frequency multipliers, and their applications	Teerachot Siriburanon, Jingzhi Zhang, Salvatore Finocchiaro
Beamforming Architectures and Circuits for Next-Generation Commercial and Defense Systems	Salvatore Finocchiaro, Akshay Visweswaran
Breaking Barriers in Bandwidth and Power: Advances in Distributed Amplifiers for Broadband Front-Ends	Tolga Dinc, Ying Chen, Salvatore Finocchiaro
Dare to Dream – The Path to True Batteryless Radios	Zeshan Ahmad, Kuo-Ken Huang
Design and Implementation of FR3 Power Amplifiers	Patrick Reynaert, Marco Vigilante, Alexandre Giry
Next-generation Optical Technologies enabling Future Data Centers and Wireless Connectivity	Bahar Jalali Farahani, Sajjad Moazenni, Antoine Frappe
Pros and Cons of moving above 100 GHz- Circuits, Systems and Potential Applications	Vadim Issakov, Sorin Voinigescu
RFICs in Space: Design Techniques Enabling Satellite Communications and Sensing in Harsh Environments	Aly Ismail, Travis Forbes
Taming Multi-beam Arrays: Emerging architectures, algorithms, and RFICs	Emily Naviasky, Oren Eliezer, Alberto Valdes-Garcia
The Next Frontier in Radar Systems	Giuseppe Gramegna, Shahriar Shahramian
Frontiers of G-Band Innovation for Next-Generation Communication and Sensing: From Ultra-High-Speed Devices to Sub-THz Integrated Circuits and Systems	Damla Dimlioglu, Hasan Sharifi, Ahmet Cagri Ulusoy

Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits

Sunday Workshops