Bio: Julian Tham received the B.S. degree (with Highest Honors) from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the M.S. degree from the University of California, Berkeley, both in electrical engineering.
Subsequent to holding engineering positions at Raytheon and Trimble Navigation where he worked on auto-calibration systems and global positioning systems (GPS), he joined Rockwell Semiconductor Systems, Newport Beach, CA between 1993 and 1999 where he was a Principal Design Engineer and Manager working on radio-frequency integrated circuits for wireless communication applications. From early 1999 to late 2003, he was with Maxim Integrated Products, Sunnyvale, CA, where he continued to lead more successful RFIC designs and served as a Principal Member of Technical Staff and Design Manager. He subsequently held Engineering Vice President positions at Berkana Wireless (acquired by Qualcomm), SiPort Inc. (acquired by Intel), and Arda Technologies. He joined Broadcom Corporation in early 2011 developing high performance MIMO WLAN wireless transceivers and served as Senior Engineering Director until 2016 when his business unit was acquired by Cypress Semiconductor and subsequently by Infineon Technologies where he is currently serving as Vice President, Wireless IoT Design Engineering, directing teams on the development of multi-mode multi-band MIMO wireless transceivers and energy efficient wireless transceivers for SoCs.
Besides developing the industry’s first fully integrated differential LC VCO in silicon, he holds 11 patents. The products with his direct involvement through design, architectural work, product development innovation leadership and management such as 900MHz Direct-Sequence Spread Spectrum cordless phones, WLAN 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax RF Transceivers and multi-band GSM/EDGE/WCDMA cellular RFIC chipsets have resulted in cumulative revenue in excess of US$3.8 Billion.
Mr. Tham is a member of Eta Kappa Nu, Tau Beta Pi, and the Golden Key Honor Society and was named Rockwell Semiconductor Systems Engineer of the Year. He is currently serving on the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference committee. He previously served as a committee chair for the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference and as a technical committee chair for the IEEE RFIC Symposium. He also served on the organizing committee for IEEE International Symposium of Circuits and Systems. He is the founding organizing chair of the inaugural CICC Mentoring event run jointly with SSCS Young Professionals and SSCS Women in Circuits. It was the first such mentoring event for an IEEE SSCS conference and has subsequently been a model for other SSCS conferences.
Abstract: This presentation describes a dual-band 2X2 MIMO 802.11a/b/g/n/ac WLAN RF transceiver capable of simultaneous dual-band operation and a triple-band 2X2 MIMO 802.11ax WLAN RF transceiver. The measured receiver sensitivity of 2 GHz at 54 Mbps is -78.3 dBm and of 5 GHz for VHT80 is -66 dBm. The 802.11ac 2 x 2 MIMO 20-MHz MCS0 2 and 5 GHz receiver sensitivity levels are -96 and -95.5 dBm, respectively. Integrated power amplifiers with Psat up to +29 dBm enable the 2-GHz transmitters to achieve TX output power of +23.5 dBm at 54-Mbps 64-quadratic-amplitude modulation (QAM). The 5-GHz transmitters achieve +17 dBm and +18 dBm output respectively for 80MHz 802.11ac MCS9 (256-QAM) and 802.11ax MCS11 (1024-QAM). The 6-7-GHz 802.11ax transmitter achieves +16 dBm output for MCS9 (256-QAM). These WLAN-BT connectivity system-on-chips are respectively implemented in 40-nm and 28-nm CMOS technologies.