Jintae Kim of UCLA and Sudip Shekhar of the University of Washington, Seattle have won Solid-State Circuits Society Predoctoral Fellowships for 2007 - 2008. The Society’s predoctoral fellows are selected each year for "their considerable accomplishments to date and their great promise for future contributions to the field of solid- state circuits," said Prof. David Hodges of UC Berkeley, Chair of the Awards Committee.

The predoctoral fellowship program provides a stipend of $15,000, tuition and fees up to $8,000, and a grant of $2,000 to the department in which the recipient is registered. Applicants are required to have completed one year of graduate study, be in a Ph.D. program in the area of solid-state circuits, and belong to IEEE.

Jintae Kim (S’03) received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea in 1997. From 1997 to 2001, he was a design engineer at Xeline, Korea, where he worked on the design and implementation of digital baseband IC for power-line communication. While working at Xeline, he acquired two U.S. patents for his contributions on new algorithms to adaptively find optimal date rate when multi-users are competing in the shared channel.

Since the fall of 2001, he has been a student in the department of electrical engineering, UCLA, under the supervision of Prof. Chih-Kong Ken Yang. From the fall of 2001 to the spring of 2003, he was a teaching assistant in the department of electrical engineering for various undergraduate circuit courses such as analog electronic circuit (EE115A) and circuit analysis (EE10, EE110). In the summers of  2003 and 2004, he was with Barcelona Design, Inc., as a summer intern. During this period, he made contributions on Barcelona's equation-based optimization engine for analog and digital circuit optimizations. This work, being a primary part of his master's research, resulted in a publication at the International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD), 2004. The focus of the paper was to demonstrate an improved device modeling methodology for the equation-based circuit optimization.

Since March 2004, he has been working towards his Ph.D. degree at UCLA. His early work in the Ph.D. program was to design an innovative serial link transmitter circuit that combines a conventional transmitter with an integrated transformer booster. This circuit enables a true pre-emphasis equalization in the serial link transmitter. The idea was presented at the International Solid State Circuit Conference of 2006 and subsequently appeared in the May issue of the JSSC, 2007.           

His current research interest is the design and optimization of CMOS mixed-signal circuits considering the multi-dimensional design tradeoff from the device, circuit, and architecture perspectives. Preliminary result of this work will be published at International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD), 2007.           

Mr. Kim was a recipient of Korea's Ministry of Information and Communication Fellowship in 2001 and was awarded a UCLA electrical engineering department fellowship or academic excellencein 2006 f.

Sudip Shekhar (S’00) received the B. Tech. degree with honors in electronics and communications engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 2003. He received the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Washington, Seattle in 2005. His M.S. dissertation focused on bandwidth extension techniques for high-speed CMOS buffers and UWB low noise amplifiers. He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree at the University of Washington, on wideband phase locked-loops for polar transmitters. 

In the summer and fall of 2005, he was an intern with the Advanced Components Division, Intel Corporation, Hillsboro, OR, where he worked on the modeling and design of serial links. During the summer of 2006 and 2007, he was an intern with the Circuits Research Lab at Intel Corporation, working on injection locking techniques and fast locking delay locked-loops. His current research interests include RF transceivers, frequency synthesizers and mixed-signal circuits for high-speed I/O interfaces.

Mr. Shekhar is a recipient of the Intel Foundation Ph.D. Fellowship for 2006–2008 and the Analog Devices Outstanding Student Designer Award for 2007. He placed 2^nd in the Analog Devices Inc Circuit Design Contest in 2004. He has published over 20 IEEE conference and journal papers and two invited book chapters, and has submitted a patent application during his graduate work.