Abstract: The ability to understand, harness, and manipulate electromagnetic fields has driven groundbreaking technological advancements in the nearly 200 years since Maxwell’s equations were formulated. The 21st century alone has witnessed remarkable progress across computing, communications, and precision healthcare, fueled by advances in both circuits and electromagnetics. Improved manufacturing and nanofabrication techniques have pushed performance boundaries, with silicon CMOS integrated circuits emerging as an ideal platform for innovation—seamlessly integrating sensing, computing, and electromagnetic field manipulation in miniaturized, low-power, and cost-effective form factors.
Despite the deep interdependence between active circuit components and passive electromagnetic structures, these domains have traditionally been designed separately—often by different engineers, as in the case of transceivers and antennas. In this talk, I will present my research group’s recent efforts in bridging this gap by leveraging CMOS-integrated circuits for precise electromagnetic field control. Specifically, I will introduce the first-ever pulse-mode Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) spectrometer on a chip and demonstrate millimeter-level precision localization for ingestible “smart” pills and human motion tracking.
Additionally, I will highlight our latest computational breakthroughs that enable the automated design of high-performance radiofrequency and nanophotonic electromagnetic structures thousands of times faster than previously possible—achieving designs beyond human intuition. Several examples will be discussed, each optimized in under an hour with modest computing power, including a 5G antenna with over 50% fractional bandwidth, a switched-beam antenna, and a broadband microstrip-to-substrate-integrated-waveguide transition that is less than one-third the size of a conventional adiabatic taper.
Bio: Constantine Sideris is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Southern California. He received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees with honors from the California Institute of Technology in 2010, 2011, and 2017 respectively. He was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Wireless Research Center from 2013 to 2014. He was a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Caltech from 2017 to 2018 working on integral equation methods for electromagnetics. Constantine’s research interests include analog/RF and photonic integrated circuits and computational electromagnetics for biomedical applications and wireless communications. He was the recipient of an ONR YIP award in 2023, an NSF CAREER award in 2021, an AFOSR YIP award in 2020, and an NSF graduate research fellowship in 2010. Constantine’s research is highly interdisciplinary and bridges the fields of applied mathematics and computation with physics, electrical engineering, medicine, and physics. His current interests in biomedical devices include portable Point-of-Care in-vitro biosensors, wearable devices for real-time monitoring and analysis of biological signals, ingestible “smart” pills, and neural interfaces. His current interests in computational electromagnetics include developing very computationally efficient algorithms for solving Maxwell’s equations and coupling them with efficient optimization algorithms to achieve the automated design of new, high-performance electromagnetic devices with a particular focus on RF and nanophotonic applications.
Despite the deep interdependence between active circuit components and passive electromagnetic structures, these domains have traditionally been designed separately—often by different engineers, as in the case of transceivers and antennas. In this talk, I will present my research group’s recent efforts in bridging this gap by leveraging CMOS-integrated circuits for precise electromagnetic field control. Specifically, I will introduce the first-ever pulse-mode Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) spectrometer on a chip and demonstrate millimeter-level precision localization for ingestible “smart” pills and human motion tracking.
Additionally, I will highlight our latest computational breakthroughs that enable the automated design of high-performance radiofrequency and nanophotonic electromagnetic structures thousands of times faster than previously possible—achieving designs beyond human intuition. Several examples will be discussed, each optimized in under an hour with modest computing power, including a 5G antenna with over 50% fractional bandwidth, a switched-beam antenna, and a broadband microstrip-to-substrate-integrated-waveguide transition that is less than one-third the size of a conventional adiabatic taper.
Bio: Constantine Sideris is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Southern California. He received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees with honors from the California Institute of Technology in 2010, 2011, and 2017 respectively. He was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Wireless Research Center from 2013 to 2014. He was a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Caltech from 2017 to 2018 working on integral equation methods for electromagnetics. Constantine’s research interests include analog/RF and photonic integrated circuits and computational electromagnetics for biomedical applications and wireless communications. He was the recipient of an ONR YIP award in 2023, an NSF CAREER award in 2021, an AFOSR YIP award in 2020, and an NSF graduate research fellowship in 2010. Constantine’s research is highly interdisciplinary and bridges the fields of applied mathematics and computation with physics, electrical engineering, medicine, and physics. His current interests in biomedical devices include portable Point-of-Care in-vitro biosensors, wearable devices for real-time monitoring and analysis of biological signals, ingestible “smart” pills, and neural interfaces. His current interests in computational electromagnetics include developing very computationally efficient algorithms for solving Maxwell’s equations and coupling them with efficient optimization algorithms to achieve the automated design of new, high-performance electromagnetic devices with a particular focus on RF and nanophotonic applications.