Asad Abidi


Asad Ali Abidi is a Pakistani-American electrical engineer. He serves as a tenured professor at University of California, Los Angeles, and is the inaugural holder of the Abdus Salam Chair at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. He is best known for pioneering RF CMOS technology during the late 1980s to early 1990s. As of 2008, the radio transceivers in all wireless networking devices and modern mobile phones are mass-produced as RF CMOS devices.
Abidi received his B.S. from the Imperial College London followed by a M.S. and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1981. He worked as an electrical engineer with Bell Labs and in January 1985 joined UCLA as a tenured academic. In 2007, he left for a three-year sabbatical to work as a founding dean of the engineering school at Lahore University of Management Sciences and returned to Los Angeles in 2009. In 2017, he was named as the inaugural holder of the Abdus Salam Chair at LUMS.
Abidi is a prominent academic and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and The World Academy of Sciences. He received the IEEE Donald O. Pederson Award in Solid-State Circuits in 2008. In 2015, UC, Berkeley recognised him as a distinguished alumnus for his contributions to the theory and practice of analog and RF circuits.

Life and education

Born and raised in Pakistan, Abidi was educated till matriculation at Cadet College Hasan Abdal, Pakistan, completed his high school from Dudley College of Technology, UK, and gained a B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering at Imperial College, London, in 1976. Later he attended University of California, Berkeley; he gained an M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering in 1978 and a Ph.D in 1981 under the supervision of Robert Meyer. Abidi is an IEEE Fellow and a member of the United States National Academy of Engineering. He joined LUMS School of Science and Engineering as its first dean.

Academic career

Since 1985, Abidi worked at UCLA, where he is currently a Distinguished Chancellor's Professor. From 1981 to 1984, he worked for Bell Laboratories as a Member of Technical Staff at the Advanced LSI Development Laboratory. He was a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Hewlett Packard Laboratories in 1989. He is one of only a few Pakistani-origin members of the NAE. and was recognized as an ISSCC top-ten author.
While working at Bell and then UCLA, he pioneered radio research in metal–oxide–semiconductor technology and made seminal contributions to radio architecture based on complementary MOS switched-capacitor technology. While working at Bell in the early 1980s, he worked on the development of sub-micron MOSFET VLSI technology at the Advanced LSI Development Lab, along with Marty Lepselter, George E. Smith and Harry Bol. As one of the few circuit designers at the lab, Abidi demonstrated the potential of sub-micron NMOS integrated circuit technology in high-speed communication circuits, and developed the first MOS amplifiers for Gb/s data rates in optical fiber receivers. Abidi's work was initially met with skepticism from proponents of GaAs and bipolar junction transistors, the dominant technologies for high-speed circuits at the time. In 1985 he joined UCLA, where he pioneered RF CMOS technology during the late 1980s to early 1990s. His work changed the way in which RF circuits would be designed, away from discrete bipolar transistors and towards CMOS integrated circuits.
He was a visiting researcher at HP Labs for a year in 1989, during which time he investigated A/D conversion at ultra-high speeds, before returning to UCLA and researching analog signal chains for disk drive read channels, high-speed A/D conversion, and analog CMOS circuits for signal processing and communications. Abidi, along with UCLA colleagues J. Chang and Michael Gaitan, demonstrated the first RF CMOS amplifier in 1993. In 1995, Abidi used CMOS switched-capacitor technology to demonstrate the first direct-conversion transceivers for digital communications.
In the late 1990s, the RF CMOS technology that he pioneered was widely adopted in wireless networking, as mobile phones began entering widespread use. As of 2008, the radio transceivers in all wireless networking devices and modern mobile phones are mass-produced as RF CMOS devices.
Abidi served as the Program Secretary for the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference from 1984 to 1990, and was the General Chairman of the Symposium on VLSI Circuits in 1992. He was the Secretary of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Council from 1990 to 1991. From 1992 to 1995, he was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

Awards and recognitions