Kamran Entesari

Kamran Entesari (S’03–M’06) received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 1995, the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from Tehran Polytechnic University, Tehran, Iran, in 1999, and the Ph.D. degree from The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA, in 2005.

In 2006, he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA, where he is currently an Associate Professor. His research interests include microwave chemical/biochemical sensing for lab-on-chip applications, RF/microwave/millimeter-wave integrated circuits and systems, reconfigurable RF/microwave antennas and filters, and RF micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS).

Prof. Entesari is currently the Associate Editor of Microwave and Wireless Components Letter (MWCL) and a Technical Program Committee (TPC) member of the IEEE RFIC Symposium. He was the recipient of the 2011 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award. He was the co-recipient of the 2009 Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) Design Contest Second Project Award, the Best Student Paper Awards of the IEEE RFIC Symposium in 2014 (second place), IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (IEEE MTT-S) in 2011 (third place), and IEEE AP-S in 2013 (honorable mention).

RF MEMS switches have become a popular choice for reconfigurable circuits due to their high performance. MEMS switch banks, phase shifters and tunable filters developed over the last decade show promise in realizing miniature reconfigurable radios of tomorrow. However, as devices are scaled to the micro-regime, thermal fluctuations in MEMS structures manifest themselves as phase noise at the output of the MEMS devices and circuits, potentially limiting their performance. This presentation discusses the non-linear effects of Brownian motion on MEMS switches, resonators and tunable filters. Mechanical instabilities in the MEMS structure when operated at high power, makes a MEMS device more vulnerable to phase noise. An insight into the effect of filter parameters on the phase noise of a MEMS tunable filter will also be provided. Non-linear noise analysis in all-pole tunable filters will be discussed in the context of a general approach to model power-dependent noise phenomenon in reconfigurable MEMS filters.