IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society Distinguished Lecturer

Title: Circuit Intuitions: Looking into a Node

Speaker: Professor Ali Sheikholeslami
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

Date: August 23, 2019 from 2:30PM to 3:30PM

Location: Jacobs Hall 2nd Floor (University of California, San Diego (UCSD), 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093) Henry Booker Room EBUI 2512

Cost: Free

Abstract:
Circuit Intuitions is column published regularly in the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine. As the title suggests, each article provides insights and intuitions into circuit design and analysis. These articles are aimed at undergraduate students but may serve the interests of other readers as well. This talk presents the first article in this series titled "Looking into a Node". What do you see when looking into a node of a linear time-invariant circuit? Most circuit designers simply see the Thevenin or Norton equivalent circuit of that node with respect to ground. We explore this for circuits including transistors. We limit ourselves to metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) transistors for now, but the procedure we describe is also applicable to bipolar transistors.

Speaker bio:
Ali Sheikholeslami has been a professor at the University of Toronto, Canada, since 1999. His research interests are jitter, analog and digital integrated circuits, high-speed signaling, and memory design. He has published over 70 journal and conference articles including several on jitter. He has served as the ISSCC Education Chair since 2013, and as a member of its wireline committee from 2007 to 2013. Since 2016, he has been the Education Chair and the Distinguished Lecturer Program Chair for the Solid-State Circuits Society. Prof. Sheikholeslami has received numerous teaching awards from the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering at the University of Toronto. He is a co-author of a book entitled Understanding Jitter and Phase Noise, published by Cambridge University Press.