Principal Investigator
Alyssa Apsel
Professor
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
College of Engineering
Cornell University
412 Phillips Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853-5401
email: apsel at ece dot cornell dot edu
office: (607)255-3962
fax: (607)254-4565
Biography
Alyssa Apsel received the B.S. from Swarthmore College in 1995 and the Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, in 2002. She joined Cornell University in 2002, where she is currently Director of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The focus of her research is on power-aware mixed signal circuits and design for highly scaled CMOS and modern electronic systems. Her current research is on the leading edge of ultra-low power and flexible RF interfaces for IoT. She is a member of the IEEE SSCS working group on IoT and has authored or coauthored over 100 refereed publications including one book in related fields of RF mixed signal circuit design, ultra-low power radio, interconnect design and planning, photonic integration, and process invariant circuit design techniques resulting in ten patents. She received best paper awards at ASYNC 2006 and IEEE SiRF 2012, had a MICRO “Top Picks” paper in 2006, received a college teaching award in 2007, received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2004, and was selected by Technology Review Magazine as one of the Top Young Innovators in 2004. She has also served on the Board of Governors of IEEE CAS (2014-2016) and as an Associate Editor of various journals including IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I and II, and Transactions on VLSI. She has also served as the chair of the Analog and Signal Processing Technical committee of ISCAS 2011, is on the Senior Editorial Board of JETCAS, as Deputy Editor in Chief of Circuits and Systems Magazine, and as the co-founder and Chair of ISCAS Late Breaking News. Professor Apsel is a Fellow of the IEEE and was a Distinguished Lecturer for IEEE CAS from 2018-2019.
Research Interests
As IC applications have multiplied over the past decade, pushing CMOS electronics beyond the PC and into everything from greeting cards to the human body, so have problems associated with nano-scale high performance CMOS. The quest for improved performance, previously masked by the progression of Moore’s law, now calls for renewed creativity and the development of fundamentally new approaches to circuit and architecture design. In our group, we consider how the progression of CMOS digital electronics and devices optimized for digital performance has affected mixed signal circuit design. We conduct research investigating new approaches to cost effective design that leverage today’s technology but achieve improved performance per unit power. We look at how problems resulting from device scaling such as process variation, noise, and reduced analog performance can be addressed with skillful analog and mixed signal design.