The IEEE has named Yannis P. Tsividis as the recipient of its 2007 Gustav Robert Kirchhoff Award, recognizing his work in developing ICs. Applications affected by his work include wireless telecommunications equipment, computer disk drives, consumer electronics products, and devices for biomedical prosthesis, such as cardiac pacemakers.

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Sponsored by the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, the award recognizes outstanding contributions to the fundamentals of electronic circuits and systems that have a long-term impact. It will be presented to Tsividis at the 2007 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco on Feb. 12.

Tsividis is the Charles Batchelor Memorial Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University in New York. He has made major contributions to the field of solid-state circuitry, concentrating on the interface between the digital computer and the analog physical world. He has developed circuits, systems and software that made possible improved “mixed-signal” semiconductor chips, which incorporate both analog and digital functions on the same piece of silicon.

Tsividis began his career by demonstrating the feasibility of metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) mixed-signal circuits. In 1976, he designed and built a fully integrated MOS operational amplifier and demonstrated its use in a coder/decoder for digital telephony. His results were widely adopted by the industry, giving way to the first massively produced mixed-signal MOS integrated circuits. Since then, he has made many other contributions at the device, circuit, system and simulation level, including techniques for fully integrated analog filters, switched-capacitor circuit theory and simulation, and precision MOS device modeling.

An IEEE Fellow, Tsividis holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, Calif. Tsividis has received the IEEE W.R.G. Baker Prize Paper and the IEEE Undergraduate Teaching Award. His book, Operation and Modeling of the MOS Transistor, is a standard reference for modeling engineers and circuit designers alike.