When Moore Meets Maxwell, Medical Applications Emerge
Speaker: Amin Arbabian, UC Berkeley
Series: Electrical Engineering Departmental Seminar
Location:
Engineering Quadrangle B205
Date/Time: Monday, February 28, 2011, 4:30 p.m.
- 5:30 p.m.
Abstract:
Smart medical devices will play a significant role in wellness, healthcare and medicine. While consumer electronics have become ubiquitous and inexpensive, medical devices, by contrast, are still primarily found only in hospitals. There is a great potential benefit in using techniques developed in the consumer electronic industry and applying them to healthcare applications. To do this, substantial innovation is required to develop new sensors and devices that are fundamentally less invasive and use profoundly different physical phenomena to address medical applications. These devices will provide better service to a rapidly aging population at a fraction of the cost of today’s technologies.
To address these and other cutting-edge applications, this research explores new opportunities in the boundary of the ever-increasing performance and speed of electronic systems (made possible by Moore’s law) and smart “electromagnetic� interfaces (including array imagers, sensors, and implantable devices). Tremendous opportunities exist for innovation in diverse topics including high-data rate short-range communications, accurate localization, radar, imaging and medical devices.
On the medical front, the main focus of this research, dielectric imaging of tissue with a Time-Domain Ultra-Wideband Synthetic Imager (TUSI) is proposed. TUSI is designed to be a low-cost portable imager operating in microwave/mm-wave spectrum suitable for specific diagnostic and screening applications. An overview of the circuit and system design and architecture choices in TUSI will be presented. Novel approaches for extreme wideband amplification plus narrow and accurately controllable pulse generation, the key challenges in attaining image quality, are addressed. The transmitter uses a smart antenna network (the Antentronic structure) to obtain improved transmit bandwidth. Various silicon measurements of the transmitter and receiver, including characterization of two fully integrated 90GHz pulsed-based transmitters, will be presented. In the end, another project example proposing a novel architecture for millimeter-wave passive transponders, suitable for implantable devices, sensors or immersion applications, is discussed.
Biography:
Amin Arbabian received the B.S. degree from Sharif University of Technology in 2005 and the M.S. degree from UC Berkeley in 2007. He is currently working towards the Ph.D. degree at the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC), UC Berkeley. In 2007 and 2008, he was part of the initial RF design engineering team at Tagarray Inc., Los Altos, CA, involved with the sub-microwatt RFID project. He was a design engineering intern at Qualcomm Corporate R&D division working on next generation ultra-low power CMOS receivers in summer 2010. Mr. Arbabian was a recipient of the 2007 Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Canadian fellowship, the 2008 Analog Devices Outstanding Designer Award, the second place 2008 RFIC symposium Best Student Paper Award, the third place award for the Big Ideas Contest held by the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) based in UC Berkeley, the Bears Breaking Boundaries innovation award from UC Berkeley (2009) and the 2009 IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTTS) graduate fellowship for work in medical imaging technology. He was also the recipient of the 2010 IEEE Jack Kilby Award for Outstanding Student Paper at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference.
