Chinmaya Mishra of Texas A & M University in College Station, Texas  and  Peter Popplewell of Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada have won the Solid-State Circuits Society Predoctoral Fellowship for 2006 - 2007. They were selected "based upon their considerable accomplishments to date and their great promise for future contributions to the field of solid- state circuits," said Prof. David Hodges of the University of California, Berkeley, Chair of the Award Committee.

Inaugurated in 1983 but suspended between 2003 - 2005, the predoctoral fellowship program provides a stipend of $15,000, tuition and fees up to $8,000, and a grant of $2,000 to the department in which the recipient is registered. Applicants are required to have completed one year of graduate study, be in a Ph.D. program in the area of solid-state circuits, and belong to IEEE.

Chinmaya Mishra (S’03) received the B.E. degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering with distinction from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India in 2002 and was awarded the Merit Scholarship for being among the top ten of all students in the entire University for the class of 2002.

In the spring of 2002 he was a technical intern in the DSP Design Group at Texas Instruments Inc., Bangalore, India where he worked on formal verification of hardware circuits. He received the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University, College Station in 2004 with a GPR of 4.0. His thesis focused on the design and implementation of low power multistage amplifiers and high frequency (>10GHz) broadband distributed amplifiers in CMOS.

From the fall of 2002 to fall 2004, he was a Texas Instruments Research Assistant in the Analog and Mixed Signal Center (AMSC). During this period he co-developed two novel, power and area efficient frequency compensation schemes for low-voltage multistage amplifiers driving large capacitive loads. This work resulted in a publication in the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits (JSSC), which was listed as one of the most read JSSC articles in the first quarter of 2005 and one of the top 100 documents accessed in the entire IEEE in April 2005.

Since September 2004, he has been working towards his Ph.D. degree at the AMSC under the supervision of Dr. Edgar Sánchez-Sinencio. From spring 2004 to fall 2005 he was part of a team that developed the first multiband UWB receiver system in a package operating from 3-10GHz. He was responsible for the development of the frequency band plan and the design of frequency synthesizers for multiband OFDM based UWB radios. His pioneering theoretical work on UWB frequency synthesis resulted in a Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques publication which was listed as one of the top 100 documents accessed in the entire IEEE in December 2005.

In the spring of 2005 he was a graduate assistant lecturer in the department of electrical engineering at Texas A&M University and was the instructor for the course ELEN 326 Electronics Circuits. During the summer of 2005, he was a RF IC Design Engineer intern at WiQuest Communications Inc, Allen, Texas, where he worked on the design of a CMOS frequency synthesizer for an ultra-wideband (UWB) radio which resulted in a U.S. patent application. In the fall of 2005, he was a teaching assistant in the department of electrical engineering for two courses, ELEN 665, Integrated CMOS RF Circuits and ELEN 325, Electronics.

Since February, 2006 he has been a technical co-op in the Communications Technology Department of IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York, where he is working on the design of millimeter wave circuits. His research interests include RF, microwave and millimeter wave circuit design on silicon and low voltage low power analog circuits.

Peter H. R. Popplewell (S’98) was born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada in 1979.  He received the B.Eng. degree in 2002 and the M.A.Sc. degree in 2004, both in electrical engineering from Carleton University in Ottawa.  While an undergraduate, he was employed by Nortel Networks’ Long-Haul Optical Networks Group as part of the team that tested and designed erbium-doped and distributed-Raman optical amplifiers.  As a Master’s student he was a resident researcher at Conexant Systems Inc. and eventually Skyworks Solutions Inc., where he studied the behavior of integrated voltage controlled oscillators (VCOs) focusing on VCO injection locking.  This research led him to design, manufacture and test an IC for measuring coupling between on-chip inductors using injection-locked VCOs which doubled as short range wireless communication devices. 

With the help of fellow Ph.D. researcher Victor Karam at Carleton University, he recently submitted a complete 5.2 GHz transceiver, which uses VCO injection locking to achieve very low power consumption, for fabrication by IBM through MOSIS. The circuit is revolutionary in that it is completely integrated, using on-chip antennas, and is self-powered by a thin film ultra-capacitor and solar cell which could be stacked on top of the chip. Because the circuit is completely integrated, including the antenna and power supply, it is ideally suited for applications where low cost is essential, such as RFID tags for merchandise. The solution is also well suited for use in dosimeters which measure radiation dosages received by cancer patients during treatment.

Mr. Popplewell has received numerous Canadian national awards and scholarships for his research, including a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) PGS-D Ph.D. Scholarship and a 2005 Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA) Graduate Scholarship. He has published papers in the proceedings of the IEEE's BCTM, CICC and other conferences, and has also been published in the Journal of Solid-State Circuits. A patent for a Lower Power, Integrated Radio Transmitter and Receiver filed in May is currently under review by The Canadian Patent Office.

While completing his Ph.D. degree, he continues to collaborate with Skyworks Solutions Inc. to research very low power and self powered RFIC designs for wireless applications focusing on RFID tags and medical sensors for treating cancer patients.