Yannis Tsividis

Yannis Tsividis

Edwin Howard Armstrong Professor of Electrical Engineering

Yannis Tsividis and his students work on the synergistic co-existence of analog and digital circuits on the same silicon chip, and the interface of such circuits with the physical, analog world.

His current focus is on analog computing and hybrid computing on silicon chips, and on event-driven, continuous-time digital circuits, signal processing, and data acquisition, in which the time dimension is a critical part of signal representation.

He is Edwin Howard Armstrong Professor of Electrical Engineering. He and his students have worked at the device, circuit, system, and computer simulation level. He demonstrated the first fully-integrated MOS operational amplifier, along with its use in a coder-decoder for digital telephony, in 1976, and proposed detailed design techniques for MOS analog circuits, which were widely adopted and led to the first massively produced mixed-signal integrated circuits. The software program Switcap, which was developed by his group, was the standard in the industry and was used in the design of many integrated circuits for telecommunications, biomedical electronics, and consumer electronics. Techniques in integrated analog filters, which he co-invented, have been in very large volume production and were a dominant technique for many years in the implementation of high-speed computer hard disc drives and other equipment. He has been an early advocate of, and contributor to, timing-based circuits and signal processing. At the device level, benchmarks proposed by him and his group for testing advanced MOS device models have been widely used and have influenced the state of the art in MOS transistor modeling. His work has resulted in about 40 patents in several countries. His book Operation and Modeling of the MOS Transistor (now in its 3d edition, with C. McAndrew) is a widely used standard, and has been translated into Chinese and Farsi.

He received his B.E.E. degree from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1972, 1973, and 1976, respectively. Among his awards are the IEEE Gustav Robert Kirchhoff Award, given annually for an outstanding contribution to the fundamentals of any aspect of electronic circuits and systems that has a long-term significance or impact, 2007, and the IEEE Circuits and Systems Education Award, 2010. His life and work were the subject of a cover story of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine, entitled “Yannis Tsividis: Path-Breaking Researcher and Educator,” in the Fall of 2014. He is an elected member of the US National Academy of Engineering.

Research Areas

  • Analog Devices
  • Integrated Circuits and Systems
  • Very Large-Scale Integration (VLSI)
  • Analog Computing
  • Hybrid Computing

Additional Information

  • Professional Experience
    • Edwin Howard Armstrong Professor of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, 2014-present.
    • Charles Batchelor Professor of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, 1998-2014.
    • Visiting Professor, University of Paris Marie Curie (now part of Sorbonne universities), 2008.
    • Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, 1990-1994.
    • Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor, Columbia University, 1976-1998.
    • Visiting Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Greece, 1983.
    • Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1980.
    • Resident Visitor, VLSI Design Group, AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, 1977-1987.
  • Professional Affiliations
    • Life Fellow, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.
  • Honors & Awards
    • IEEE W.R.G. Baker Award for the best IEEE publication, 1984.
    • Best Paper Award, European Solid-State Circuits Conference, 1986.
    • Fellow, IEEE, since 1986.
    • Lewis Winner Award for Outstanding Paper, IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference, 2003 (co-recipient).
    • IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Golden Jubilee Medal, 2000.
    • IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Darlington Award, 1987 (co-recipient).
    • IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Guillemin-Cauer Award, 1998 and 2008.
    • Great Teacher Award, Society of Columbia Graduates, 1991.
    • Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award, Columbia Engineering School Alumni Association, 1998 and 2010.
    • Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching, Columbia University, 2003.
    • IEEE Undergraduate Teaching Award, 2005.
    • IEEE Circuits and Systems Education Award, 2010.
    • Professor Honoris Causa, University of Patras, Greece, 2012- present.
    • Outstanding Achievement Award, University of Minnesota, 2013.
    • IEEE Gustav Robert Kirchhoff Award, given annually for an outstanding contribution to the fundamentals of any aspect of electronic circuits and systems that has a long-term significance or impact, 2007.
    • Elected member, US National Academy of Engineering.
    • His life and work were the subject of a cover story of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine, “Yannis Tsividis: Path-Breaking Researcher and Educator”, Fall 2014.
  • Education
    • Ph.D., Engineering, University of California, Berkeley.
    • M.S., Electrical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley.
    • B.S., in Electrical Engineering, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.