IEEE S.F. Bay Area Council e-GRID's
BayAreaTech

THURSDAY October 23, 2014
SCV Solid State Circuits Chapter
– interfaces, mixed-signal, fooling Nyquist, analog-domain info …
Speaker: Prof. Boris Murmann, Stanford University
Time: Networking and snacks at 6:00 PM; Presentation at 6:30 PM
Cost: none
Place: Maxim Integrated, 160 Rio Robles, San Jose
RSVP: from website
Web: sites.ieee.org/scv-sscs

In the early days of my engineering career, analog circuit design was viewed as doomed and no longer needed in future systems that will be almost entirely digital and rely on standard analog interfaces that need no further optimization.  A we all know, this was wrong.  Nonetheless, it is true that in most modern systems, the analog interface often plays only a minor role in the overall signal processing function.  This is also evidenced, for example, by our constant craving for “software defined” devices in which all available information is dumped into the digital domain and sorted out using purely digital processing.
In this talk, I will review a number of research ideas in which analog blocks participate more actively in the acquisition, selection and processing of the desired information.  We will discuss concepts related to “fooling Nyquist” and extracting desired analog-domain information using low-rate and low-bandwidth observations.  In addition, we will investigate the potential for mixed-signal co-processors in machine learning algorithms and other applications that can benefit from approximate computing and analog pre-processing.