Jeff Walling

CMOS is ubiquitous for computation, and as such plays an ever-increasing role in our lives as we use computation to improve working efficiency. Increasing levels of integration have made it possible to embed analog and RF circuits with digital processing to create RF systems-on-chip. This has been driven by scaling that has optimized the transistor for switching performance rather than operation as a transconductor. Hence, transmitter architectures that focus on switching have potential to be more optimal in the future. I will introduce the concept of the switched capacitor PA (SCPAs), which leverages CMOS inherent strengths of fast switching and lithographic matching to yield a linear, efficient digital PA, where no transistor is used as a current source. I will present ways that the SCPA can be leveraged as a direct-digital-to-RF transmitter in low-power IoT, NB-IoT, along other connectivity applications and highlight some of my group’s research. I will also highlight the state of the art in SCPAs, including recent extensions of operation to the near-mm-Wave.

Biography:

Jeff Walling received his BS from University of South Florida and his MS and PhD from University of Washington, all in Electrical Engineering. He has held industrial positions at Motorola, Intel, Qualcomm and Skyworks. His research has primarily focused on circuits for wireless communications and sensing. From 2012 to 2019, he was an assistant, then associate professor at University of Utah. Then he was head of RF transceivers at Tyndall National Institute in Cork, Ireland. Since 2021, he is an associate professor at Virginia Tech. He has served as an associate editor for TCAS-II, TCAS-I and JSSC, and on the technical program committees of the IEEE RFIC, ISSCC and NEWCAS conferences. He is a senior member of the IEEE and has more than 80 papers in peer reviewed conferences and journals.