Saad Bin Nasir and Bijan Tehrani won Best Paper in Session Awards at SRC TECHCON 2017, making Georgia Tech one of the universities that were honored with two awards at the conference. They are both Ph.D. students in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE),

TECHCON was held September 10-12 in Austin, Texas and is organized annually by SRC to bring together students, faculty, and industry experts who are involved in microelectronics research and to exchange news about the progress of selected SRC sponsored research programs. Descriptions of Nasir’s and Tehrani’s papers and their work follow.

Saad Bin Nasir won the top award in the Power Management Session for the second consecutive year, and his award-winning paper is entitled “A Reconfigurable Hybrid Low Dropout Voltage Regulator for Wide-Range Power Supply Noise Rejection and Energy-Efficiency Trade-off.” Nasir works on digital and mixed-signal power management circuits in the Integrated Circuits and Systems Research Lab, where he is advised by ECE Associate Professor and ON Semiconductor Junior Professor Arijit Raychowdhury. 





The research described in this paper brings together novel control techniques and their circuit implementations in reconfigurable hybrid linear regulators for wireline and wireless IO. The principal aim of this research is to demonstrate a four-way reconfigurable linear regulator exhibiting wide range PSR and energy-efficiency trade-off. The measured power supply rejection ranges from -9dB to -34dB and corresponding power-efficiency range from 87% to 56%.

Parts of this ongoing research have been previously published in the International Solid State Circuits Conference, the Journal of Solid State Circuits, the IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, the European Solid State Circuits Conference, and the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference and have gained significant traction with SRC’s member companies.


Bijan Tehrani won the top award in the Packaging: Heterogeneous Integration Session for his paper entitled “Inkjet-/3D-Printed Sloped Interconnects for the Realization of Through-Mold Vias with 3D Millimeter-Wave Wireless Packages.” Tehrani works on additively manufactured RF modules and packaging in the ATHENA Lab, where he is advised by ECE Professor Manos Tentzeris, who also holds the Ken Byers Professorship in Flexible Electronics.

The effort described in this paper is centered around the combination of highly reconfigurable additive electronic manufacturing methods to develop application-specific “smart” packages for next-generation wireless systems. 3D stereolithography and inkjet printing technologies are used in tandem to realize ramped RF interconnects with slopes up to 65 degrees for the system-on-package integration of fully-printed antenna arrays and passive components directly within an IC molding. These printed through-mold vias exhibit low insertion loss ranging from 0.5–0.6 dB/mm into the E-band wireless regime, providing a 10x reduction in loss compared to traditional wire bonding methods at 60 GHz.

Highlights of these research efforts have been published in the Proceedings of the IEEE International Microwave Symposium and the International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation, with support from SRC industry partner Texas Instruments.