Faculty

Vishal Saxena, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Delaware
140 Evans Hall
Newark, DE 19716

Office: DuPont 110B | Lab: DupPont 323
Phone: (302) 831-4365 | Fax:
URL: http://lumerink.com

Dr. Vishal Saxena is an Associate Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Delaware. His research is in Analog Electronic and Photonic integrated circuit (IC) design.

Dr. Saxena received the B. Tech. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras , India in 2002, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) from Boise State University in 2007 and 2010 respectively. From 2010 to 2016, he was an Assistant and then Associate Professor in the ECE Department at Boise State University. From 2016 to 2019, he was the Micron Endowed Professor of Microelectronics in the ECE department at University of Idaho. In Fall 2019, he joined the ECE department at UD as an Associate Professor. He has also held engineering positions in the semiconductor industry.

At University of Delaware, Dr. Saxena directs the Analog Mixed-Signal and Photonic Integrated Circuits (AMPIC) Lab located in Du Pont building and teaches courses in circuit design. His research interests include energy-efficient cross-physical layer links, CMOS photonic interconnects, RF/mmWave photonics, Continuous-time Delta-Sigma ADCs, and low-power VLSI for enabling embedded Artificial Intelligence.

Dr. Saxena's research has been continually supported by industry and federal agencies including NSF, DOD, and NASA. Dr. Saxena received the 2015 NSF CAREER, 2016 AFOSR Young Investigator Program (YIP) award, and 2019 DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA) for his work on Analog electronic and CMOS photonic integrated circuits. He also received Keysight faculty research award and Idaho’s Accomplished under 40 (AU40) award in 2016. He has given several invited talks, including TEDx, on his research and taught tutorials at international conferences including IEEE MWSCAS, SOCC, ICASSP. He is a member of the IEEE, ACM, Eta Kappa Nu and Tau Beta Phi. He has been an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems-II: Express Briefs. Currently, he is serving on the steering committee for the IEEE International Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems (MWSCAS), VLSI committee of the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), and Guest Editor for Journal of Low Power Electronics and Applications (JLPEA). He was the founding Chair of the Boise section of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS) chapter.

PhD Students

Anuar Dorzhigulov - Neuromorphic Integrated Circuits



Shubham Mishra - Optoelectronic IC Design



New PhD Student 1 - W-band Radiometer Design in SiGe BiCMOS.

Starting Spring 2023. New PhD Student 2 - Reconfigurable Photonic Integrated Circuits.

Starting Spring 2023.

Undergraduate Researchers

Chase Lawrence - NSF REU and UD UG Summer Researcher 2021
Ben Weinel - UD UG Summer Researcher 2021

Graduated PhD Students

Md Jubayer Shawon - Large-scale Reconfigurable Silicon Photonic Integrated Circuits for RF Photonics and Optical Signal Processing (U. Delaware)
Jubayer received his B.S. degree from BUET in Bangladesh and M.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Idaho in Fall 2019. He joined the AMPIC group in Fall 2017 and graduated with his PhD in Summer of 2023. He is now with Cisco Systems in Holmdel, NJ


Ruthvik Vaila - Deep Spiking Neural Network Algorithms (with Dr. John Chiasson at Boise State)
Ruthvik Vaila graduated from National Institute of Technology (NIT) - Calicut (India) in 2014 with a Bachelor's degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering. He joined BSU in Fall 2015. He is working towards his PhD in Neuromorphic Deep Learning under the guidance of Dr. John Chiasson. He has previously worked on IoT and Road Detection for Autonomous Vehicles. His primary interests are in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

Rui Wang - Silicon Photonics: Overview, Building Block Modeling, Chip Design and its Driving Integrated Circuits Co-Design (with Dr. Herb Hess at U. Idaho)
Kehan Zhu - Optical PAM interconnects
Kehan received the B.S. degree from Xiangtan University, China, 2006, the M.S degree from Jiangnan University, China, 2008, both in microelectronics engineering. He graduated with his PhD in December 2016 following the successful defense of his dissertation, "Integrated Circuit Design for Hybrid Optoelectronic Interconnects." During this research, he taped-out and tested two 130nm BiCMOS designs and one SOI photonic chip and demonstrated a hybrid PAM-4 transmitter.
(Now with: Maxim Integrated, Hillsboro, OR | BSU Explore Feature)

Xinyu (Tomas) Wu - Monolithic spiking neural networks using nano-scale ReRAMs
Xinyu Wu graduated from Fudan Univeristy in 2001 with a Bachelor's degree in Electronics Engineering. He finished his Master's degree from the Fudan Univeristy in ASIC design for high performance computing in year 2004. He graduated in Fall 2016 with his doctoral dissertation on, "Analog Spiking Neuromorphic Circuits and Systems for Brain- and NanoTechnology-Inspired Cognitive Circuits." During this path-breaking research he demonstrated first CMOS Neurons that can interface with dense RRAM synapses; and novel CMOS-RRAM circuit motifs to realize energy-efficient spiking neural networks that can be applied to real-world pattern recognition, a precursor to chip-scale Deep Learning.
(Now with: DRAM Research, Micron Inc, Boise, ID | BSU Explore Feature)

Sakkarapani Balagopal - CT ΔΣ ADCs for next-generation wireless systems and software-defined radios. Sakkarapani demonstrated first Continuous-time Delta-Sigma ADC with a two-step quantizer for wideband data conversion.
(Now with: Cirrus Logic, Austin, TX | BSU Explore Feature)

Graduated Masters Students

Md Jubayer Shawon (UI 2019) RF photonic circuit design. (Continuing his PhD at UD)
Virginia Molina (BSU 2017) Integrated photonic filter design. (First placement: ARM Inc, Cambridge, UK)
Rajaram Mohan Roy Koppula (BSU 2012) MS Thesis Title: A Mixed-signal design flow for CT ΔΣ ADCs. (Now with: Qualcomm Inc, Phoenix, AZ)

Visiting Scholars

Qiang Chen - Neuromorphic autonomous robot navigation (with Dr. John Chiasson)
Qiangchen graduated from the Naval University of Engineering in 2003 with a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering & Automation. He finished his Masters degree from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Control Engineering in 2006. He worked in Wuchang Shouyi University (the former is Huazhong University of Science and Technology Wuchang Branch) since 2003. He is visiting Dr. Chiasson and Dr. Saxena's research group starting in February 2016. His research interested are navigation for autonomous mobile robots, graphical information processing for reasoning and control, distributed neural computation.

Past Undergraduate Researchers

Susan Arnopolin - NSF REU researcher 2020
Keegan Miley Hunter - NSF REU researcher 2018 at UI
Tyler Bevan - NSF STEP researcher 2012 at BSU