NEWS

• • 8/13/2018
    Jimmy Mawdsley is named Siebel Scholar. Congratulations to Jimmy on winning this prestigious award!

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    8/8/2018
    
    Our group will collaborate with the quantum photonics lab, led by Prof. Dirk Englund at MIT, and the quanta research group, led by Prof. Isaac Chuang at MIT, on a very large scale integrated electronics and photonics platform for quantum-information processing. This project will be supported by the Research Advanced by Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering (RAISE) program at the National Science Foundation.

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    7/26/2018
    Our group and the Energy-Efficient Circuits and Systems Group led by Prof. Anantha Chandrakasan at MIT will be supported by the SpecEES (Spectrum Efficiency, Energy Efficiency and Security) program of National Science Foundation (NSF).
    In this program, the two teams will jointly innovate tagging devices that utilize highly-secured transmission of sub-THz waves.

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    7/19/2018
    Congratulations to Cheng Wang on passing his research qualifying exam (RQE)!

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    7/13/2018
    A new paper on molecular clock–a new approach towards low-cost miniaturized frequency reference with atomic-clock-grade stability, is published on Nature Electronics today. This paper describes the fundamental physics of the clock, experimental data of the reference molecules (carbonyl sulfide), two prototypes (both at lab-scale and chip-scale), as well as the stability analysis and measurements. Congratulations to Cheng Wang and other members (James Mawdsley, Mina Kim, Y. Xiang and Zihan Wang) of the molecular clock team!
    Update (7/16/2018): The paper features on the cover of the journal’s July issue, and the homepage of www.mit.edu.
         

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    7/11/2018
    The National Science Foundation (NSF) has granted the Terahertz Integrated Electronics Group at MIT an award in support of our work on CMOS-based THz molecular clock. In this project, novel interdisciplinary approaches combining the unique feature of molecular rotation and state-of-the-art circuit/architecture will be applied in order to achieve enhanced stability and energy efficiency. We thank NSF for funds supporting this project and our early exploratory efforts on chip-scale wave-matter interactions.

5/16/2018
Prof. Ruonan Han will deliver a keynote speech at the 2019 German Microwave Conference (GeMiC) in Stuttgart, March 25, 2019. He will also give invited talks in the following conferences:

• IEEE Radio-Frequency Integrated Circuit (RFIC) Symposium (Philadelphia, PA, June 2018)
• Progress in Electromagnetics Research Symposium (Toyoma, Japan, PIERS, August 2018)
• IEEE European Microwave Symposium (Madrid, Spain, September 2018)
• IEEE International Conference on Solid-State and Integrated Circuit Technology (ICSICT, Qingdao, China, Nov. 2018)
• IEEE Topical Meetings on Silicon Monolithic Integrated Circuits in RF Systems (SiRF, Orlando, FL, Jan. 2019).

4/2/2018
Two of our recent works on chip-scale wave-matter interactions will be presented on IEEE VLSI Circuit Symposium in Honolulu, HI. Mohamed Ibrahim will demonstrate, for the first time, optically-detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond using a CMOS chip. In collaborating with Prof. D. Englund’s group at MIT, we aim to significantly reduce the cost and form factor of quantum sensors for magnetometry. For the second work, Cheng Wang invents an “atomic clock on CMOS chip” using a low power and compact sub-THz spectrometer. This new frequency reference provides a long-term stability that is orders of magnitude higher than quartz-crystal oscillators. This work is also selected as the technical highlight of the conference.

2/11/2018
Our 240GHz large-scale heterodyne sensing array paper (Zhi Hu as the first author) is accepted to 2018 IEEE Radio-Frequency Integrated Circuit (RFIC) Symposium. On this CMOS chip, 32 heterodyne receivers are implemented with fully-integrated, phase-locked LO generator. Compared to prior square-law detector arrays, this chip increases the sensitivity by 6x and enables electronic steering of two concurrent narrow beams.

12/25/2017
Two invited papers on IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits are published (2017 December Issue and 2018 May Issue [available online]). Details of our THz frequency-comb-based spectrometer on a CMOS chip and our 1-THz radiation source on a SiGe chip are presented.

12/20/2017
Prof. Han joined the IEEE Radio-Frequency Integrated Circuit (RFIC) Symposium Technical Program Committee.

12/7/2017
For the 2nd time in a row, Prof. Ruonan Han delivered an invited talk at IEEE Intl. Electron Device Meetings (IEDM). He presented the group’s latest research progress in large-scale homogeneous and heterogeneous THz arrays, as well as the future trend of chip development, for ultra-high-resolution sensing and broadband spectroscopy.

11/1/2017
Prof. Ruonan Han gave two invited talks recently on IEEE Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems (MWSCAS) and IEEE European Microwave Symposium.

9/1/2017
We welcome three new members to the group. Dr. Xiang Yi joined as a post-doctoral researcher. Prior to this appointment, he was a research scientist in Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore. Mina Kim (B.S. & M.S. Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, Korea) and Muhamed Ibrahim Khan (B. S., National University of Science and Technology, Pakistan, M.S. KAIST, Korea) joined as PhD students.

6/4/2017
Zhi Hu’s paper on a large-scale 1-THz radiator array in SiGe won the best student paper award (2nd-place) at the 2017 IEEE Radio-Frequency Integrated Circuit (RFIC) Symposium. Using innovations at device and electromagnetic levels, this work achieves record total radiated power (0.1mW) in mid-THz range among all silicon electronic chips. In particular, up to 91 coherent active radiators are integrated within only 1mm² die area.  The award was presented by the RFIC TPC Chair, Dr. Kevin Kobayashi. Congratulations to Zhi!

2/8/2017
Cheng Wang presented a paper on IEEE International Solid-State Circuit Conference (ISSCC 2017) — the flagship conference for integrated circuits and systems. In this paper, Cheng introduced high parallelism into broadband THz molecular sensing, and successfully obtained the ultra-narrow rotational spectral lines of molecules using a pair of CMOS frequency-comb chips.
Congratulations to Cheng!