Hua Wang

Hua Wang is a full professor and chair of electronics at Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (D-ITET) of Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich (ETH Zürich). He is the director of the ETH Integrated Devices, Electronics, And Systems (IDEAS) Group. Prior to that, he was an associate professor with tenure at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. He held the Demetrius T. Paris professorship at School of ECE at Georgia Tech. He was the founding director of Georgia Tech Center of Circuits and Systems (CCS) and the director of the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System (GEMS) lab. He worked at Intel Corporation and Skyworks Solutions from 2010 to 2011. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, in 2007 and 2009, respectively.

Dr. Wang is interested in innovating analog, mixed-signal, RF, and mm-Wave integrated circuits and hybrid systems for wireless communication, sensing, and bioelectronics applications. He has authored or co-authored over 200 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers.

Dr. Wang received the DARPA Director’s Fellowship Award in 2020 (the first awardee in Georgia Tech’s history), the DARPA Young Faculty Award in 2018, the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2015, the Qualcomm Faculty Award in 2020 and 2021, the IEEE MTT-S Outstanding Young Engineer Award in 2017, the Georgia Tech Sigma Xi Young Faculty Award in 2016, the Georgia Tech ECE Outstanding Junior Faculty Member Award in 2015, and the Lockheed Dean’s Excellence in Teaching Award in 2015.

His research group has won multiple academic awards and best paper awards, including the 2019 Marconi Society Paul Baran Young Scholar, the IEEE RFIC Best Student Paper Awards (2014, 2016, 2018, and 2021), the IEEE International Microwave Symposium (IMS) Best Student Paper Award 2021, the IEEE CICC Outstanding Student Paper Awards (2015, 2018, and 2019), the IEEE CICC Best Conference Paper Award (2017), the 2016 IEEE Microwave Magazine Best Paper Award, and the IEEE SENSORS Best Live Demo Award (2nd Place in 2016).

Dr. Wang is a Technical Program Committee (TPC) Member for IEEE ISSCC, RFIC, CICC, and BCICTS conferences. He is a Steering Committee Member for IEEE RFIC and CICC. He is the Conference Chair for CICC 2019 and Conference General Chair for CICC 2020. He is a Distinguished Microwave Lecturer (DML) for the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S) for the term of 2022-2024. He was a Distinguished Lecturer (DL) for the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS) for the term of 2018-2019. He was the Chair of the Atlanta’s IEEE CAS/SSCS joint chapter that won the IEEE SSCS Outstanding Chapter Award in 2014.

This distinguished lecture talk presents an overview of RF and mm-wave Power Amplifier (PA) designs in silicon, focusing on the fundamentals, design practices, and advanced PA topologies. First, the distinguished lecture talk will introduce PA performance metrics and their impacts on wireless systems. Next, it presents PA device-level designs, including active device large-signal operations, nonlinearity, and stability as well as passive network impedance transformation and power combining. Basic load-/source-pull simulations and biasing techniques will be covered. Then, the talk will go through popular PA classes of linear and switching PAs. The talk will cover a wide variety of advanced PA topologies that enhance bandwidth, efficiency and linearity. Finally, the distinguished lecture talk will conclude with several PA design examples at RF and mm-Wave frequencies.