2003 IEEE Fellows

An IEEE Fellow is a member of unusual distinction in the profession. This recognition is conferred only by invitation of the Board of Directors upon a person of outstanding and extraordinary qualifications and experience in IEEE designated fields, who has made important individual contributions to one or more of these fields. No more than one-tenth of one percent of the total Institute membership may be advanced to Fellow grade in any given year.
A nomination for Fellow must be accompanied by references from at least five current IEEE Fellows. A nominee must be a Senior Member of the Institute and must have been a member in any grade for at least five years prior to the year of election. Each nomination is evaluated by the relevant technical society or council and is ranked by the 26-member IEEE Fellows Committee. Multiple reviewers produce a composite viewpoint that is used in recommending to the Board of Directors suitable candidates for election to Fellow grade.
The IEEE conferred the distinction of Fellow on 260 of its members of the class of 2003. Here are five of nineteen new Fellows who are members of the Solid-State Circuits Society. These new Fellows were evaluated by the SSCS and recognized at the 10 February ISSCC Plenary Session. The remaining fourteen members will be introduced in our July issue.

Professor Bernhard E. Boser
University of California, Berkeley

For contributions to integrated MEMS and learning algorithms


Bernhard E. Boser received his Diploma in electrical engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 1984 and his MS and PhD from Stanford University in 1985 and 1988, respectively. From 1988 to 1992 he was a member of the technical staff in the Adaptive Systems Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories. In 1992 he joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also serves as a director of the Berkeley Sensor & Actuator Center. Dr. Boser's research is in the area of analog and mixed-signal circuits, with special emphasis on micromechanical sensors and actuators. He has served on the Program Committees of the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, the Transducers Conference, the VLSI Symposium, and is currently the editor of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

Dr. Mehdi Hatamian
Broadcom Corporation, Irvine, CA,

For contributions to the design of high-performance digital signal processors


Mehdi Hatamian received his BS in electrical engineering from the Arya-Mehr University of Technology in Tehran, Iran, in 1977 and his MS and PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1978 and 1982, respectively. From 1978 to 1982 he worked on one of NASA's Space Shuttle programs, developing hardware and software designs to support in-flight biomedical experiments. From 1982 to 1991 he was a member of the Visual Communications Research and the VLSI Systems Research departments of Bell Laboratories where he was named Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff in 1988 for his contribution to VLSI signal processing. From 1991 to 1996, he was vice president of technology at Silicon Design Experts, Inc., a company he co-founded. In 1996 he joined Broadcom Corporation where he is the senior director of DSP Microelectronics Technology.
Dr. Hatamian's areas of expertise are high-speed VLSI signal processing, image processing and compression, full-custom and low-power circuit and architecture design, adaptive filtering, Gigabit Ethernet transceiver design, high-density deep sub-micron CMOS and SOC design, memory circuits, and high-temperature superconductors. He has published nearly 50 papers in his areas of expertise and holds 18 patents with several patents pending. He has participated in numerous national and international conferences and other professional activities in his field as organizer, session chair, panelist, invited lecturer, and moderator. He serves on the board of directors of Panacea Pharmaceuticals, Inc., GuardianCam, MEC Corp., and Star-e-Media, Inc.

Professor Behzad Razavi
University of California, Los Angeles,

For contributions to high-speed communication circuits


Behzad Razavi received his BS in electrical engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 1985 and his MS and PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1988 and 1992, respectively. He was with AT&T Bell Laboratories and Hewlett-Packard Laboratories until 1996. Since September 1996, he has been associate professor and, subsequently, professor of electrical engineering at UCLA
Professor Razavi served on the Technical Program Committees of the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) from 1993 to 2002 and the Symposium on VLSI Circuits from 1998 to 2002. He has also served as guest editor and associate editor of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, and International Journal of High-Speed Electronics.
Professor Razavi received the Beatrice Winner award for editorial excellence at the 1994 ISSCC, the best paper award at the 1994 European Solid-State Circuits Conference, the best panel award at the 1995 and 1997 ISSCC, the TRW Innovative Teaching award in 1997, and the best paper award at the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference in 1998. He was the co-recipient of both the Jack Kilby Outstanding Student Paper award and the Beatrice Winner award for Editorial Excellence at the 2001 ISSCC.
He is an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer and is the author of Principles of Data Conversion System Design (IEEE Press, 1995), RF Microelectronics (Prentice Hall, 1998) (also translated into Japanese), Design of Analog CMOS Integrated Circuits (McGraw-Hill, 2001) (also translated into Chinese and Japanese), and Design of Integrated Circuits for Optical Communications (McGraw-Hill, 2003). He also is the editor of Monolithic Phase-Locked Loops and Clock Recovery Circuits (IEEE Press, 1996) and Phase-Locking in High-Performance Systems (IEEE Press, 2003).

Dr. Takayasu Sakurai
University of Tokyo, Japan

For contributions to the modeling and design of high speed VLSI circuits

Takayasu Sakurai received his PhD in electronic engineering from the University of Tokyo, Japan, in 1981. He then joined Toshiba Corporation, where he designed CMOS DRAM, SRAM, and BiCMOS ASICs. He also worked on simple yet accurate interconnect delay and capacitance models (known as Sakurai models) and the alpha power-law MOS models that are widely used in industry and academia, giving insights to deep submicron problems and solutions. He was a visiting researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, carrying out research in the field of VLSI CAD. Back at Toshiba, he managed RISCs and multimedia VLSI design projects. He invented sense-amplifying flip-flops, VTCMOS (variable threshold voltage CMOS scheme), a dual-voltage converter scheme, hot carrier resilient circuits, and other digital and memory circuits, which are adopted in current high-performance, low-power VLSI's. In 1996 he moved to academia and he is now a professor at the University of Tokyo.
Dr. Sakurai has been published in approximately 250 technical publications (including more than 30 invited papers) and has filed about 100 patents. He served as a conference chair for the Symposium on VLSI Circuits and as a technical program committee member for ISSCC, CICC, DAC, ICCAD, FPGA workshop, ISLPED, ASPDAC, TAU, and other international conferences. He also is consulting to U.S. startup companies. His current research interests include SIP (System In a Package), high-speed interconnects, low-voltage memories, ultra low-power design of VLSI systems, and ubiquitous VLSIs (some recent results are published in a Plenary talk of the 2003 ISSCC).

Professor Stefan Michel Steyaert
Katholieke Universiteit te Leuven, Belgium

For contributions to the design of CMOS RF communications circuits


Michel S.J. Steyaert was born in Aalst, Belgium, and received his MS in electrical-mechanical engineering and his PhD in electronics from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (K.U. Leuven), Heverlee, Belgium, in 1983 and 1987, respectively. From 1983 to 1986 an IWNOL fellowship (Belgian National Foundation for Industrial Research) allowed him to work as a research assistant at the Laboratory ESAT at K.U. Leuven. In 1987 he was responsible for several industrial projects in the field of analog micropower circuits at the Laboratory ESAT as an IWONL project researcher. In 1988 he was a visiting assistant professor at UCLA. In 1989 he was appointed by the National Fund of Scientific Research (Belgium) as research associate, in 1992 as a senior research associate, and in 1996 as a research director at the Laboratory ESAT, K.U. Leuven. Between 1989 and 1996 he was also a part-time associate professor. He is now a full professor at the K.U. Leuven. His current research interests are in high-performance and high-frequency analog integrated circuits for telecommunication systems and analog signal processing.
Professor Steyaert received the 1990 and 2001 European Solid-State Circuits Conference best paper award, the 1995 and 1997 ISSCC evening session award, the 1999 IEEE Circuit and Systems Society Guillemin-Cauer award, and the 1991 and the 2000 NFWO Alcatel-Bell-Telephone award for innovative work in integrated circuits for telecommunications.