Peter Kinget

Bernard J. Lechner Professor of Electrical Engineering; Director, PhD Admissions

Peter Kinget’s research combines device, circuit, signal processing, and system insights to develop new concepts for designing analog and radio-frequency integrated circuits that connect the physical, analog world to the digital world of computing.

His research group focuses on the design of analog and RF integrated circuits in scaled technologies and the novel systems or applications they enable in communications, sensing, and power management. His work has made significant contributions in deriving the fundamental limits on analog circuit power consumption in the context of device-size reduction and supply voltage lowering driven by the relentless semiconductor scaling into the nanoscale.

With his students, he has demonstrated ultra-low voltage analog circuits down to 0.5V, timing-based analog circuits, and ultra-wideband RF circuits. These enable aggressive scaling of critical functions for migration into advanced technologies or for the design of self-powered systems that can operate from harvested ambient energy. His research on reconfigurable RF circuits paves the way for next-generation wireless systems to support the insatiable demand for connectivity.

Kinget is a Fellow of the IEEE and has won several awards including the "2020 Innovative Education Award" from the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society and the 2011 “Outstanding Paper on New Communication Topics” from the IEEE Communications Society. He received his engineering and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from the Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven, Belgium.

Research Areas


  • Analog Devices
  • Integrated Circuits and Systems
  • Nanoelectronics
  • Very Large-Scale Integration (VLSI)
  • Neuromorphic Computing
  • Ultra-low Power Electronics for Sensory and Cognitive Hardware and the Internet of Things
  • Efficient Implementation of Next-G Wireless Communications Systems: Multi-antenna, Cognitive Radio, Ultra-wideband Pulse Radio
  • Design of Analog and RF Integrated Circuits in Nanoscale CMOS Technologies
  • Design of Ultra-low Voltage and Ultra-low Power Analog and RF Circuits

Additional Information


  • Professional Affiliations
    • IEEE, Fellow
  • Honors & Awards
    • Fellow, IEEE, 2011
    • Inaugural Recipient of the “IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society Innovative Education Award” (Feb. 2020)
    • Co-recipient of “Best Student Paper Award – 3rd Place” at the 2018 IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits (RFIC) Symposium for “An 8-Element, 1-3GHz Direct Space-to-Information Converter for Rapid, Compressive-Sampling Direction-of-Arrival Finding Utilizing Pseudo-Random Antenna-Weight Modulation” (with Matt Bajor)
    • Co-recipient “Best Demo Award” at the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on the Internet of Things Design and Implementation (IoTDI) for “An Ultra-Low-Power Custom Integrated Circuit based Sound-Source Localization System” (with D. de Godoy, S. Xia, W. Fernandez, X. Jiang)
    • Co-recipient “Outstanding Student Paper – Runner up (2nd place)” at the 2017 IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC) for “A-236.3dB FoM Sub-Sampling Low-Jitter Supply-Robust Ring-Oscillator PLL for Clocking Applications with Feed-Forward Noise-Cancellation,” April 2018 (with S. Nagam)
    • Co-recipient “Best Poster Award” at the 2015 IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC) for "A Field-Programmable Noise-Canceling Wideband Receiver with High-Linearity Hybrid Class-AB-C LNTAs,” Sept. 2015 (with J. Zhu)
    • Co-recipient of the “Best Demo – Runner Up Award” at 14th ACM Conference on Embedded Network Sensor Systems (SenSys) Nov. 2016, (with R. Chandrasekaran, D. de Godoy, S. Xia, M. Islam, B. Islam, S. Nirjon, and X. Jiang)
    • Co-recipient of “Best Student Paper Award – 2nd Place” at the 2015 IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits (RFIC) Symposium (with Yang Xu)
    • Co-recipient of the “Student Poster Award 2nd Place” for “Metacapacitor: Large Area, Low Cost, High Performance Capacitors for Power Electronics,” FlexTech Alliance Conference, Feb. 2014 (with S. Yang, B. Van Tassell, C. Le, S. Liu, E. S. Leland, D. A. Steingart, S. O'Brien, and I. Kymissis)
    • Co-recipient of the “First Prize ($100K) in the 2012 Interdigital Innovation Challenge (I2C)” for “Ultrasonic Wireless Sensors” (with K. Yadav and I. Kymissis)
    • Co-recipient of the “2011 IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communication” for an outstanding paper published in any IEEE Communications Society publication in the previous 15 years for the paper entitled “Energy-Harvesting Active Networked Tags (EnHANTs) for Ubiquitous Object Networking,” (with M. Gorlatova, I. Kymissis, D. Rubenstein, X. Wang and G. Zussman)
    • Co-recipient of the “Best Student Demo Award” for "Demo: Organic Solar Cell-equipped Energy Harvesting Active Networked Tag (EnHANT) Prototypes" at the ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (ACM SenSys) 2011 (with G. Stanje, P. Miller, J. Zhu, A. Smith, O. Winn, R. Margolies, M. Gorlatova, J. Sarik, M. Szczodrak, B. Vigraham, L. Carloni, I. Kymissis, and G. Zussman)
    • Co-recipient of the “First Prize in the 2009 Vodafone Americas Foundation Wireless Innovation Challenge” for “Active Networked Tags for Disaster Recovery Applications” (with G. Zussman, I. Kymissis, D. Rubenstein and X. Wang)
    • Co-recipient of “Best Student Paper Award – 1st Place” at the 2008 IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits (RFIC) Symposium (with F. Zhang and R. Gharpurey).
    • IBM Faculty Award (March 2005)
    • Award for the ‘Best Engineering thesis of Applied Sciences for the class of 1990’ (1 award among 360 students) at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) granted by the class of 1965 (Oct. 1990).
  • Professional Experience
    • (July 2016 – present) Bernard J. Lechner Professor of Electrical Engineering, Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York (NY, USA).
    • (July 2017 – June 2020) Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York (NY, USA).
    • (July 2011 – June 2016) Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York (NY, USA).
    • (July 2014 – June 2016) Vice Chair of Faculty Affairs, Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York (NY, USA).
    • (July 2011 – July 2014) Director of Graduate Programs, Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York (NY, USA).
    • (Oct. 2012 – 2014) Founding (co-)Chair of the Smart Cities Center in the Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering, Columbia University, New York (NY, USA).
    • (Sept. 2010 – Aug. 2011) Visiting Research Professor, Institut ICTEAM, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain la Neuve (Belgium).
    • (July 2002 – June 2011) Associate Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York (NY, USA) [Tenure July 2008].
    • (April 2002 - June 2002)Principal Engineer at Multilink Corporation, Somerset (NJ, USA).
    • (Sept. 2000 - Jan. 2002) Director, VLSI in the ‘VLSI and Integrated Electro-optics Group’ of Celight Inc., Iselin (NJ, USA).
    • (July 1999 - August 2000) Senior Staff Scientist in the ‘Analog and RF Microelectronics Group’ of Broadcom Corporation, Irvine (CA, USA).
    • (Oct. 1996 - June 1999) Member of Technical Staff (Principal Investigator) in the ‘Design Principles Research Department’ of the ‘Wireless Laboratory’ at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill (NJ, USA).
    • (Sept. 1991 - Sept. 1996) Research assistant in the ESAT-MICAS laboratory of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven (Belgium).
    • (Sept. 1990 - Aug. 1991) Belgian military service at the “Technical Department of the Army”, Peutie (Belgium).
    • (Spring 1998 and 2002) Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York (NY, USA).
  • Education
    • PhD, Electrical Engineering, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium)
    • Ir, Electo-Mechanical Engineering, option Electronics, B.S./M.S. equivalent, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium)