Our lab is located in the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, in Yorktown Heights, NY, located about 35 miles north of New York City. We work in the Communications Technology Department. This department of ~50 people is working on various communications technologies, including high-speed wired, optical, and wireless communications. The members of the millimeter-wave team are listed below with brief biographical sketches.
Don Beisser attended SUNY at Stony Brook and has been employed as an Engineering Technician and Field Service Engineer at Texas Instruments, Fairchild Semiconductor and DuPont Photomasks. After several years employed as a contractor at Watson Research Central Scientific Services Microfabrication Lab, Don joined IBM full time in 2001 and is now an Advanced Technical Specialist. He is currently involved in the physical design, checking and assembly of the millimeter wave circuits. His interests include the physical design of Analog and Mixed Signal Circuits in CMOS, BiPolar and SiGe technologies.
Yasunao Katayama (M’95) received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in physics from Tokyo University in 1984 and 1986, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1994. He joined IBM in 1986 and is currently a Senior Researcher with IBM Research, Tokyo Research Laboratory. He has been involved with a variety of academic disciplines covering physics, information theory, VLSI/system design, and optical/wireless communication research. More specifically, he has been involved with positron physics, the fractional quantum Hall effect, post-CMOS devices, numerical analysis, high-speed dynamic random access memory (DRAM) design, logic/DRAM integration, fault-tolerant memory systems, error correcting codes in optical and wireless communications. He was an editor of the Information Processing Society of Japan Magazine. Dr. Katayama is a member of the American Physics Society (APS), the Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ), and the Institute of Electronics Information and Communication Engineering (IEICE), Japan. He was the recipient of the IBM Japan Overseas Scholarship Award and Outstanding Technology Achievement Award.
Duixian Liu received his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from XiDian University in Xi'an, China in 1982, MS. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio in 1986 and 1990, respectively. From 1990 to 1996, he worked for Valor Enterprises Inc. in Piqua, Ohio first as an electrical engineer and then the chief engineer. He has been with IBM at Thomas J. Watson Research Center as a research staff member since April 1996. His research interests are antenna design, electromagnetic modeling, digital signal processing, and communications technology. He twice received the IBM's outstanding technical achievement awards in 2001 and 2002, and one IBM Corporate Award, the IBM's highest technical award, in 2003 for contributions to the integrated antenna subsystems for laptop computers.
Jean-Olivier Plouchart received in 1994 the Ph.D. degree in Electronics from Paris VI University, France. From 1989 to 1996 he worked with Alcatel, France Telecom and University of Michigan on HBT and MESFET MMICs for communication applications. In 1996, he joined as a research staff member the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center where his work involved the design of SiGe BiCMOS and CMOS RFIC circuits for wireless LAN applications, as well as RF product designs for Motorola. In 2000, he led a team working on low-power high-performance SOI SoC technology and enablement, leading to the first demonstration of 130 and 90nm SOI ASIC, as well as the enablement of the first 3.5W 1GHz Pentium class microprocessor. He also pioneered the design of millimeter wave SOI CMOS from 30 to 94GHz in standard microprocessor technology. His research interests include solid-state technologies, the design and optimization of high-speed circuits, the integration of RF transceivers and PLL with microprocessors for SoC applications, the RF measurement automation and the Design For Yield in nanometer technologies. Currently, he works on the development of nanometer high-speed circuit design and high-yield nanometer design at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY. Dr. Plouchart is a Senior IEEE member, Chairman of the CSICS CMOS committee, and coauthor of the best student paper award at the 2002 IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuit Conference. He holds two US patents with ten pending, and has authored or coauthored over 70 publications.
Daiju Nakano received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in physics from Tokyo University in 1994 and 1996, respectively. He joined IBM in 1996 and is currently a researcher with IBM Research, Tokyo Research Laboratory. His major field is optical physics related with laser spectroscopy and in IBM he has been involved with a liquid crystal display technology, TFT-array tester development and wireless communication research. More specifically, he has been involved with optical design and evaluation for a color-filter-less LCD, overdrive technology for fast response LCD, effective backlight design for collimated backlight LCD, development of TFT-array tester for a AMOLED display and forward error correction design for wireless communication.
Arun Natarajan received the B.Tech. degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 2001 and the M.S. and Ph.D degrees in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, in 2003 and 2007, respectively. He joined IBM in 2007 and is presently a Research Staff Member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY. His research focuses on the design of high-frequency integrated circuits. His current research interests include RF and analog circuit design, wireless transceivers, and multiple-antenna system design. Dr. Natarajan received the Caltech Atwood Fellowship in 2001, the Analog Devices Outstanding Student IC Designer Award in 2004, and the IBM Research Fellowship in 2005.
Scott Reynolds received the B.S.E.E. degree from the University of Michigan in 1983, the M.S.E.E. from Stanford University in 1984, and the Ph.D. in electrical engineering also from Stanford in 1987. He joined IBM in 1988 and is presently a research staff member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. His job responsibilities have involved analog and mixed-signal circuit design for high speed communication systems, including optical, wired and RF wireless systems, and disk drive channels. Currently, he is engaged primarily in development of RFICs for high data rate wireless communication links. He is a two-time recipient of the Lewis Winner Award for Outstanding paper at the 2004 and 2006 International Solid-State Circuits Conferences.
Alberto Valdes-Garcia received the B.S. degree in electronic systems engineering (highest honors) from the Monterrey Institute of Technology (ITESM), Campus Toluca, Mexico, in 1999, and recently completed his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering at Texas A&M University, College Station. In 2000, he was a Design Engineer with the Broadband Communications Sector, Motorola. In the summers of 2002 and 2004 he completed internships with Agere Systems and IBM Research. In 2006, he joined the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. His research interests include circuit design for millimeter-wave and ultra-wideband communications. He was a scholarship recipient by the Mexican National Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT) from 2000-2005. In 2005, he received the Doctoral Thesis Award presented by the IEEE Test Technology Technical Council (TTTC).
Brian Floyd received the B.S. with highest honors, M. Eng., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA in 1996, 1998, and 2001, respectively. In 2001, he joined IBM where he is presently a research staff member and manager at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, in Yorktown Heights, New York. His work at IBM has included the design and development of WCDMA receivers, silicon millimeter-wave transceivers for applications at 60 GHz and above, and frequency synthesizers for 60 GHz. Since 2007, he has managed the RF and wireless circuits and systems group at IBM Research, focusing on millimeter-wave research and development. Dr. Floyd has authored or co-authored over 50 technical papers and is a member of the steering and technical program committees of the RFIC Symposium. He was a phase-one winner and phase-two first runner-up of the 2000 SRC Copper Design Challenge; a co-recipient of the 2007 Pat Goldberg Best Paper Award in computer science, electrical engineering, and mathematics at IBM Research; and a two-time recipient of the IEEE Lewis Winner award for best paper at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in 2004 and 2006.
Mehmet Soyuer received a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley in 1988, subsequently joining IBM at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center as a Research Staff Member. His work has involved high-frequency mixed-signal integrated circuit designs, in particular monolithic phase-locked-loop designs for clock and data recovery, clock multiplication, and frequency synthesis using silicon and SiGe technologies. He managed the Mixed-Signal Communications Integrated-Circuit Design group from 1997 to 2000, and since then has been the Senior Manager of the Communication Circuits and Systems Department at Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY. Dr. Soyuer has authored numerous papers in the areas of analog, mixed-signal, RF, microwave, and nonlinear electronic circuit design, and he is an inventor and co-inventor of eight U.S. patents. He serves on the ISSCC program committee and was an associate editor for JSSC from 1998-2000.