NextG Distinguished Seminar Series Speaker: Alyosha Molnar, Cornell University Date: Nov 13, 2024 Time: 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm Location: B205 Engineering Quadrangle Title: Solving the “Cocktail Party Problem” for Radios: Circuit and System Techniques for Mitigating Interference Abstract: Even as wireless systems become increasingly important to the functioning of society, they are a victim of their own popularity, with the RF spectrum increasingly load and crowded, creating a sort of “cocktail party problem” for wireless receivers. This can partly be resolved by expanding into new, higher frequency bands that are not yet crowded, but also requires making better use of the frequency bands we already use. In particular, there will be a need for RF and mmWave systems that are flexible enough to make use of whatever spectrum is available, but also sufficiently resilient to strong interference in other bands so as not to be disrupted by them. I will briefly introduce the concept of N-path mixers and filters in modern CMOS, and how their capabilities map nicely onto the emerging needs of flexible, interference tolerant receivers. I will then discuss our more recent work developing techniques to map N-path designs to higher, mmWave frequencies, while maintaining the mixers’ dynamic range without burning excessive power. This will then lead to a discussion of a new style of flexible receiver, leveraging circuit and algorithm co-design to identify and remove interference artifacts from one’s received signal. I will also briefly discuss some of our recent work on tiny, wireless neural implants, (not because its related, just because it is really neat). Bio: Alyosha Molnar received his B.S. in engineering from Swarthmore College in 1997, and M.S. (2003) and Ph.D. (2007) in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. From 1998 to 2002, he was a design engineer with the RFIC Group at Conexant Systems, Inc., Newport Beach, CA, where he co-led the development of the first cellular direct conversion receiver to be successfully sold on the open market, as well as the first fully integrated quad-band GSM transceiver. In graduate school he worked on one of the first sub-milliwatt radios for “smart dust”, before spending several years in a neuroscience lab studying the biological circuits that underlie early image processing in the mammalian retina. He has been a faculty member with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University since 2007, doing research spanning RF and mmWave integrated circuits for flexible wireless systems, novel image sensors and associated image processing, neuroscience and neural interface systems and circuits, and microscale autonomous systems. Molnar is the Ilda and Charles Lee Professor of Engineering at Cornell, and is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the DARPA YFA, ISSCC’s Lewis Winner award, and The Darlington Best Paper Award, along with many other research and teaching awards.