Robert W. Brodersen received a B.S. in
both Electrical Engineering and Mathematics from California
State Polytechnic University, Pomona, in 1966, and his M. S.
and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1968
and 1972, respectively. After spending three years with
Texas Instruments in Dallas, he joined the faculty of the
EECS Department at Berkeley in 1976, where he has pursued
research in the areas of RF and digital wireless
communications design, signal processing applications, and
design methodologies. In 1994 he was the first holder of the
John R. Whinnery Chair in Electrical Engineering and
Computer Sciences. In 1998 he was instrumental in founding
the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC), a consortium
involving university researchers, industrial partners, and
governmental agencies that is involved in all aspects of the
design of highly integrated CMOS wireless systems. He
retired in 2006 as Professor Emeritus, but remains active at
BWRC, where he is Co-Scientific Director, and at the Donald
O. Pederson Center for Electronics Systems Design.
His career includes significant
contributions to the areas of low power design and wireless
communications, including system-level real-time
prototyping, ultra-wideband radio systems, multiple-carrier
multiple-antenna algorithms, microwave CMOS radio design,
and the CAD tools necessary to support these activities. He
has authored or co-authored over 200 journal articles and
conference papers in these areas, published 11 books,
supervised over 50 dissertations, and holds three patents.
He was a leading contributor (with J. Rabaey, R. Katz, E.
Brewer, and P. Wright) to the InfoPad Project (1992-1997),
which created the first wireless web terminal, even before
the Web came into being. He was also a principal developer
(with J. Wawrzynek and J. Rabaey) of the BEE2 (Berkeley
Emulation Engine 2), a field-programmable gate array-based
platform utilized for prototyping and testing advanced
wireless systems. It is currently being used by the RAMP
Project to emulate large-scale multicore systems, and is
also in use for high-performance radio telescope projects.
Prof. Brodersen has been the recipient
of numerous awards during his career. In 1980 he was a
co-recipient (with G. Jacobs, D. Allstot, and P. Gray) of
the IEEE W. R. G. Baker Prize Paper Award for best IEEE
publication in the prior year for the article "Design
techniques for MOS switched capacitor ladder filters." He
was co-recipient with P. Gray and D. Hodges of the IEEE 1983
Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award for "pioneering
contributions and leadership in research on
switched-capacitor circuits for analog-digital conversion
and filtering." He has received two major IEEE Technical
Achievement Awards, the first in 1987 from the Circuits and
Systems Society in recognition of the originality and
continuity of his technical contributions, and the second in
1990 from the Signal Processing Society for his recognized
impact on the field. In 1997 he was the recipient of the
IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society Award for "contributions
to the design of integrated circuits for signal processing
systems," and in 1998 received the ACM SIGMOBILE Computing
Award for his work on the InfoPad. In 1999 he received a
Technologie Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Lund
in Sweden. In 2000, he was a recipient of an IEEE Millennium
Medal, as well as the Circuits and Systems Society's Golden
Jubilee Award. In 2003, he was honored as one of the top ten
contributors over the last 50 years to the IEEE
International Solid-State Circuits Conference.
Prof. Brodersen is a Fellow of the
IEEE and a Member of the National Academy of Engineering.
