Dr. Atif Shamim delivers two short courses at IMS 2013

About

​​The abstract of the half-day course titled, 'Co-Design of On-Chip Antennas and RF circuits for System-on-Chip Applications​' is given below and covered the topics published in the IEEE Microwave Magazine article, "The Last Barrier: On-Chip Antennas." 

Antennas are an integral part of wireless communication devices and traditionally have remained off the chip resulting in large-sized modules. In the last few years, the increased level of integration provided by silicon technologies and emerging applications at millimeter-wave frequencies has helped to achieve true System-on-Chip solutions bringing the antennas on the chip. This is because antenna sizes at these frequencies become small enough for practical on-chip realization. At the same time, there are a number of challenges to overcome, for instance, impedance matching with active components, silicon substrate losses, layout restrictions, on-chip characterization to name a few. Furthermore, the co-design of circuits and antenna which sometime have contradicting requirements need knowledge of both the domains. This half-day short course aims to discuss the above challenges in detail as well as the proposed solutions. It includes a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art in the field and discusses the upcoming trends in on-chip antennas integrated with circuits from an application perspective where they are being used in Terahertz, implantable, MEMS and Energy Harvesting applications. A number of on-chip antennas and circuits co-design examples will be shown in CMOS and GaN platforms.

The abstract of the full day course titled, 'Inkjet-Printed RF Electronics' is given below: 

This short course introduces inkjet printing as an emerging new technique to realize low cost, flexible and wearable systems in the field of RF electronics. Inkjet printing is being used for many years for printing graphics, texts, and images but only recently it has one more growing area of application which is printing electronic systems on a variety of different substrates. The sudden rise of interest in inkjet-printed electronics is due to the recent development of conductive inks which can achieve conductivities close to that of copper. In this short course, the inkjet printing process and its applications in RF electronics are discussed along with the issues and challenges compared to conventional photolithographic techniques. The materials that can be used to produce inks along with the ink properties required for the inkjet process are also discussed. Inkjet printing allows the use of several different kinds of flexible, low cost and transparent substrates which are described in this course. An overview of state of the art inkjet-printed devices and systems is presented. Applications of inkjet printing with design examples including antennas, passives, and transistors are shown.