Speaker:

Dr. Mona M. Hella, Professor, Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Abstract:

The increasing demand for bandwidth in applications such as high-speed communication transceivers and rotational gas spectroscopy, has driven recent research efforts in the millimeter wave and terahertz waves circuits and systems. This revived interest goes hand-in-hand with advances in modern CMOS and SiGe technologies that are capable of providing transistors with cutoff frequencies 𝑓𝑚𝑎x exceeding 300GHz and expected to approach 1~THz within few years. Such technologies are key enablers for low cost, high yield, multi-functional and highly integrated systems. However, as the cutoff frequency of transistors increase, their output power, particularly when covering a wide bandwidth becomes very limited. In addition, switching such transistors as they operate close to their 𝑓𝑚𝑎x is a challenging task that requires rethinking the traditional communications, sensing, and spectroscopy architectures with emphasis on extracting the output power of transistors while transmitting data rates exceeding tens and hundreds of Gbps and / or scanning a wide bandwidth. In this talk, we review recent progress in silicon-based fundamental building blocks for signal generation and detection in the 100 GHz - 300GHz frequency range.

Biography:

Mona Mostafa Hella (Senior Member, IEEE) received B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in electronic and communications engineering from Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA, in 2001. From 2001 to 2003, she was with RF Micro Devices Inc. (now Qorvo), Billerica, MA, USA, working on optical communication circuits and silicon-based wireless systems. She joined the Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering Department, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA, in 2004, where she is currently a Professor. She was the Sensors Thrust Leader for the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center (ERC) on Light Enabled Systems and Applications (LESA) (2010 – 2018). She coauthored two books:Power Management Integrated Circuits and Technologies(CRC Press, Taylor and Francis Group, 2016) and RF CMOS Power Amplifier, Theory, Design, and Implementation (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), three book chapters, and published over 100 peer-reviewed conference and journal publications. Her research interests include the areas of mm-wave, THz circuits and systems, and integration platforms for biomedical sensing and energy harvesting applications. Dr. Hella serves on the Technical Program and Steering Committees of the Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits (RFIC) Symposium, the Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems (MWSCAS), and the Optical Fiber Communication (OFC) Conference. She was Fulbright Scholar in 2015, and has served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE trans. on Very Large-Scale Integration from 2011 to 2014, and the IEEE trans. on Circuits and Systems-I since 2019.