Soroush Araei, a PhD student in MIT's Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, received the prestigious Jack Kilby Outstanding Student Paper Award at the plenary session of the 2025 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), which took place in San Francisco earlier in February.
Soroush’s paper titled: “5.2 0.25-to-4GHz Harmonic-Resilient Receiver with Built-In HR at Antenna and BB Achieving +14/+16.5dBm 3rd/5th IB Harmonic B1dB,” solves the decade-long issue of harmonic folding in passive mixers using a fully passive switched-capacitor structure that protects against harmonics at all internal nodes. The presented receiver achieves exceptional linearity performance with respect to harmonic blockers. With the rising interest in FR3 (7-24GHz) spectrum (which are at harmonics of the legacy sub 7-GHz band), the traditional sub-7GHz radios employing this technique can be protected from large interfering signals at higher harmonics. The research was carried out under the supervision of Prof. Reiskarimian in Radius lab (https://radiuslab.mit.edu/).
An extended version of this paper was recently published at IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits further describing this work.
The ISSCC Jack Kilby Outstanding Student Paper Award is an extremely competitive distinction in honor of Jack Kilby, an integrated-circuits pioneer who was responsible for designing the first monolithic integrated circuit, and who was a long-term ISSCC participant and contributor. The Award is based on ratings by conference attendees in the previous year and has been awarded to only four papers in the last ten years.
Congratulations, Soroush!