Solid State Circuits Society

March 19 2009

Our speaker was  Prof. Bernhard E. Boser (EECS, UC-Berkeley ), and the topic of his presentation was  ” Positive Feedback, Negative Feedback – A closer look at phase margin”

Abstract

Feedback comes close to a “magic bullet” in the design of precision electronic circuits. But behind the magic lurks possible catastrophe in the form of instability. We will discuss stability criteria in the context of stabilizing a MEMS resonator with multiple high frequency resonances, each providing 180 degrees of phase lag and in turn get a better appreciation for the Nyquist criterion and the subtle differences of positive and negative feedback.

Biography

Prof. Bernhard E. Boser received the Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 1984 and the M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1985 and 1988. From 1988 he was a Member of Technical Staff in the Adaptive Systems Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories. In 1992 he joined the faculty in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley where he also serves as a Director of the Berkeley Sensor & Actuator Center. Dr. Boser’s research is in the area of analog and mixed signal circuits, with special emphasis on analog-digital interface circuits and micromechanical sensors and actuators. He has served on the program committees of the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, the Transducers Conference, the VLSI Symposium, and the Sensor and Actuator Workshop. He was the Editor of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, served as the Chair of the Publications Committee, and is currently the Vice President of the Solid-State Circuits Society. Dr. Boser is a Fellow of the IEEE and a distinguished lecturer of the SSCS. In 2004 he co-founded SiTime and in 2005/06 he was a visiting professon at the Institute of Micro- and Nanosystems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

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