Axel Thomsen was born in Hamburg, Germany on 1/16/65. He attended the Polytechnical 
University of Braunschweig, Germany, from 1984 to 1988. From 1988 to 1992 he attended Georgia
 Institute of Technology, where he received his Ph. D. in Electrical Engineering in the area 
of analog IC design. From 1993 to 1995 he was Assistant Professor at the University of 
Alabama in Huntsville. From 1995 to 2001 he was a design engineer and manager at Cirrus Logic 
in Austin where he worked on high resolution data-acquisition ICs, ADCs, DACs and amplifiers.
He is currently a Distinguished Engineer at Silicon Laboratories, where he has worked on low
 jitter timing circuits, PLLs, power and isolation ICs and MCUs. Occasionally he teaches 
analog IC design at UT Austin. He holds about 40 patents and has published 20 papers. 
He is a member of the Technical Program Committee at ISSCC.

Dr. Ramin K. Poorfard received his Ph.D. from University of Toronto in 1995. Consequently, 
he joined Bell Labs in March of 1995 where he was involved in the GSM base-band product 
development for cellular phones. In 1999, he was promoted to the rank of Distinguished Member 
of Technical Staff. In July of 2000, he joined Silicon Laboratories Inc. in Austin TX where 
he worked on ADSL products and subsequently on Satellite receiver front ends. In 2010, 
he was promoted to the rank of Distinguished Design Engineer position. In 2012, 
he assumed the role of Director of Engineering overseeing the video line of products within 
Silicon Laboratories. Dr. Poorfard’s interests are RF IC architectures and their building block 
integrations as well as mixed-signal design.