Research Topics

Radio-Frequency ICs have dramatically impacted the life of human beings through wireless communications. In the past 20 years, the proliferation of new applications and new standards led to a saturation of the spectrum up to 10GHz. Meanwhile, the progress of silicon technologies opened the door to the exploitation of the millimeter-wave band (30GHz-300GHz) where ultra-wide available spectrum portions are enableing unprecedent boost of wireless communications capacity (i.e. 5G and beyond) and high-resolution radars sensors for autonomous cars and a variety of other applications. The short wavelength and the integration capability of silicon allow the implementation of active phased array transceivers with hundreds of active antenna elements in package or on board. In this framework, development of compact and low power ICs operating above 100GHz is currently a major technical challenge.

Data transfer in a fully-connected digital society is growing exponentially, sustained by streaming, cloud computing and storage, artificial intelligence and machine learning. In the evolution of the communications interfaces, tighter integration of optical and electrical components, improved electrical link power efficiency and increased serial data rates play crucial roles. A key challenge for future digital interconnects is delivering higher transfer rate over channels with increasing loss under stringent power performance. The research activities on high-speed serial links are, in tight cooperation with leading companies, focused on the study of novel system-level communication architectures and circuit ideas to push in an efficient way the performance of electrical and electro-optical interfaces toward the terabit/second transfer-rate.