Connecting the Dots in Circuit Design

The air around us is practically buzzing with wireless signals transmitting everything from text messages to streaming video. To travel from sender to receiver, those signals need a power boost at the moment they leave the device. 

Alfred Davidson, a fifth-year PhD student in electrical engineering at Columbia Engineering and a CUbiC scholar, spent the summer of 2024 designing components that give radio signals that extra juice. As a member of the Radio Frequency Amplifiers team at Texas Instruments, he was tasked with designing a high-performance power amplifier, which controls the amount of power used to send signals from an antenna. 

Davidson, who studies integrated circuits and systems under the guidance of Professor Harish Krishnaswamy, says the technology comes down to balancing transmission power with energy consumption.

“If you can push out more power, you can transmit over a longer distance —but you have to think about efficiency,” he said.

Seeing Industry from the Inside

While at Texas Instruments’ Dallas campus, Davidson got to see the entire industrial process for integrated circuits, from design and fabricating to verification and mass manufacturing. This enabled him to more effectively incorporate feedback and insight from the teams responsible for ensuring the final product is reliable, economical, scalable, and poised for commercial success.

“You don’t get to see these other steps as part of research at a university,” he said. The internship renewed his motivation and filled him with creativity for his PhD project. The experience also equipped him with a new technical toolkit that allows him to ask more profound research questions that will ultimately improve his circuit designs.

“It was very motivating to be in a large team and spend time with so many people who are similarly passionate about the kind of work they’re doing,” he said. Davidson, originally from Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India, has always been interested in teaching, but he’s now considering a more hybrid career where he can also work in industry. 

“I’ve been in the academic world for a long time,” he said. “Gaining professional experience in the U.S. for the first time was a very enlightening journey.”