Yannis Tsividis

He is Edwin Howard Armstrong Professor of Electrical Engineering. He and his students have worked at the device, circuit, system, and computer simulation level. He demonstrated the first fully-integrated MOS operational amplifier, along with its use in a coder-decoder for digital telephony, in 1976, and proposed detailed design techniques for MOS analog circuits, which were widely adopted and led to the first massively produced mixed-signal integrated circuits. The software program Switcap, which was developed by his group, was the standard in the industry and was used in the design of hundreds of integrated circuits for telecommunications, biomedical electronics, and consumer electronics. Techniques in integrated analog filters, which he co-invented, have been in very large volume production and were a dominant technique for many years in the implementation of high-speed computer hard disc drives and other equipment. He has been an early advocate of, and contributor to, timing-based circuits and signal processing. At the device level, benchmarks proposed by him and his group for testing advanced MOS device models have been widely used and have influenced the state of the art in MOS transistor modeling. His work has resulted in about 40 patents in several countries. His book Operation and Modeling of the MOS Transistor (now in its 3d edition, with C. McAndrew) is a widely used standard, and has been translated into Chinese and Farsi.

He received his B.E.E. degree from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1972, 1973, and 1976, respectively. Among his awards are the IEEE Gustav Robert Kirchhoff Award, given annually for an outstanding contribution to the fundamentals of any aspect of electronic circuits and systems that has a long-term significance or impact, 2007, and the IEEE Circuits and Systems Education Award, 2010. His life and work were the subject of a cover story of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine, entitled “Yannis Tsividis: Path-Breaking Researcher and Educator,” in the Fall of 2014. He is an elected member of the US National Academy of Engineering.