64th IEEE International Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems

Abstract

Chalking the Path to Limitless Wireless Connectivity

Khurram Waheed

During the last thirty years, wireless technology evolution, both in cellular and connectivity domains, has changed our lives forever. This has coincided with an amazing run that the semiconductor industry has had over the last few decades with shrinking technical nodes that have made both computation and storage widely affordable. In the wireless world, this has enabled tighter integration, miniaturization, extension of battery life and vastly improved user experience. However, wireless semiconductor technology is now headed to a new frontier, where the economics and exigence for technology scaling have vastly different connotations and requirements for the radio-frequency front-ends and the digital radio back-ends, perhaps forcing the need for heterogenous integration. Meanwhile, ubiquitous increased integration of wireless connectivity in smart phones, edge nodes and smart things has propelled the various wireless connectivity standards to contemplate and enable new applications and use-cases by specifying enhanced end-to-end security, increased throughput, localization technologies and collaborative communications to name a few. While heralding omnipresent connectivity, future connectivity systems will face significant challenges due to anticipated spectral congestion and interactions between collocated radios requiring widespread use of adaptive artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide reliable quality of service.

Bio

Photo of Khurram WaheedKhurram Waheed is an NXP fellow and leads system architecture activities for the connectivity portfolio. Besides design, he is a leading contributor to NXP’s long-term innovation initiatives for wireless radios, mentoring university research and leads wireless patent portfolio management. Dr. Waheed received his B.Sc.(Hons.) in Electrical Engineering from University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan (1994) and both his M.S. (2000) and Ph.D. (2003) in Electrical Engineering from Michigan State University. From 1994 to 1999, he worked on various defense and industrial research and development projects. During 2003-04, he was a faculty at San Diego State University. From 2004 to 2010, he lead 2G/3G/4G cellular radio design system architecture teams at Texas Instruments Inc., Dallas (2004-09) and Bitwave Semiconductors, MA (2009-10). Since 2010, he has been with Freescale/NXP. Dr. Waheed has published 70+ technical papers and holds 50+ granted patents. He has also contributed to several standardization activities including 3GPP, IEEE (802.11, 802.15 and P1901.2), Wi-SUN and BT-SIG. Dr. Waheed’s research interests include novel radio architectures and circuits, PHY/modem architectures, wireless localization technologies, adaptive and blind machine learning, non-linear control & signal processing algorithms, and their implementations. He is a member of IEEE Circuits and Systems and Communication Societies, serves on IEEE VSATC and CASCOM Technical committees and is an active reviewer for various international journals and conferences.