Time: 12:30 p.m. - 1:20 p.m.

Location: Van Leer, WC240

Speaker: Farrokh Ayazi

Speaker’s Title: Professor 

Speaker’s Affiliation: The Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Seminar Title: Integrated CMOS-MEMS Acoustic Microsystems for Health Informatics and IoT

Abstract: This talk describes the development of acoustic inertial measurement sensors which comprises of wideband uni-directional accelerometer contact microphones with micro-gravity resolution and multi-axis resonator gyroscopes with self-calibration capabilities for use as acoustic auscultation devices in body-worn sensor arrays. Combining such devices into a multi-degree-of-freedom inertial measurement unit (IMU) on a single-chip enables the simultaneous measurement of pulmonary lung sounds, chest wall motion, heart mechano acoustic signals, as well as of user body motion. The CMOS ASIC for the acoustic IMU consists of switched capacitor and transimpedance amplifier front-end circuits that utilize correlated double sampling and chopping for the dynamic cancellation of offset and flicker noise, and use charge injection calibration techniques to compensate for MEMS capacitor mismatch. For tuning and alignment of gyroscopic resonators, low-noise high-voltage (20V) charge pumps are implemented on-chip. We discuss the prospects of reducing power while maintaining precision in interface ICs for MEMS IMUs and review a few IoT applications of these devices.

Biographical Sketch of the Speaker: 

Farrokh Ayazi is the Regents Entrepreneur, and the Ken Byers Professor in Microsystems in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech, where he has been a member of the academic faculty since January 2000. During his career at Georgia Tech, he has graduated 32 Ph.D. students and advised 21 postdoctoral fellows and research engineers. He is currently also the founder at StethX Microsystems, a spin-off of his research lab that is developing next-generation wearable devices for long-term monitoring of cardio-pulmonary diseases using a proprietary microchip sensor technology. Prior to StethX, Dr. Ayazi was founder and CTO of Qualtré, another spinout of his research lab that develops bulk acoustic wave gyroscopes for autonomous car and personal navigation systems, which was acquired by Panasonic in 2016. Dr. Ayazi is a fellow of IEEE and holds 65 patents. He was the general chair of the IEEE Micro-Electro-Mechanical-Systems (MEMS) conference in 2014, held in San Francisco, CA. He also served on the technical program committee of the IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) for six years. Dr. Ayazi was the recipient of the campus wide Outstanding Achievement in Research Innovation Award from Georgia Tech in 2018.