ECE 290 Seminar: High-Frequency Circuits for Next-Generation Communication: From Beyond-5G mm-Wave MIMO to Co-Packaged Optics
Presenter: Susnata Mondal, Research Scientist, Intel
Description:
Rapid growth in wireless connectivity, cloud computing, and AI infrastructure is driving an urgent need for communication systems that can deliver higher data rates with improved energy efficiency. Meeting these demands requires advances in high-frequency circuit design across both wireless and wireline domains, spanning millimeter-wave radios to optical interconnects.
This seminar will present recent developments in two complementary directions. The first focuses on millimeter-wave MIMO systems for beyond-5G communication. Conventional phased arrays are typically limited to single-stream beamforming, while fully digital solutions, although flexible, incur significant power and area overhead. Emerging hybrid architectures enable multi-stream, multi-band operation with improved spectral efficiency by combining RF and baseband beamforming, supporting carrier aggregation, adaptive spatial processing, and full-duplex operation. Prototype systems have demonstrated scalable multi-antenna transceivers operating across 28/37 GHz bands, integrating RF front-ends, beamforming networks, and system-level signal processing.
The second direction addresses high-performance computing interconnects, where electrical links increasingly struggle with loss and energy efficiency at high data rates. Co-packaged optics offers a promising alternative by placing optical engines in close proximity to compute and switch chips, improving link efficiency. The seminar will discuss circuit and system innovations enabling scalable optical I/O, including equalization, clocking, and high-linearity design techniques for high-speed optical links, along with recent prototype demonstrations achieving high data rates with low energy per bit.
Bio: Susnata Mondal received the B.Tech. and M.Tech. degrees in E&ECE from IIT Kharagpur in 2015 and the Ph.D. degree in ECE from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, in 2020. Since then, he has been a Research Scientist at Intel, Hillsboro, working on co-packaged optics and high-speed I/O. He has authored several lead-author papers in ISSCC and JSSC and holds 18 U.S. patents. He is a Technical Program Committee member of RFIC and an Associate Editor for TCAS-I, TCAS-II, and SSCL. His honors include the SSCS Predoctoral Achievement Award, the Best Ph.D. Thesis Award from CMU ECE, and selection as an SSCS Rising Star.
Hosted by: Professor Soumya Bose, ECE Department
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/97975378707?pwd=ljcgaCfhMmhZ88Vt5dqQUBVQRjehOx.1