M.C. Frank Chang: Electrical Engineering

M.C. Frank Chang, Wintek Chair Professor and Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering, is also the Director of the High Speed Electronics Laboratory, at UCLA.

Before joining UCLA, Chang was the Assistant Director and Department Manager of the High Speed Electronics Laboratory at the Rockwell Science Center (1983-1997). In this tenure, he successfully developed and transferred AlGaAs/GaAs Heterojunction Bipolar Transistor (HBT) and BiFET (Planar HBT/MESFET) integrated circuits technologies from the research laboratory to the production line (now Conexant Systems and Skyworks). The HBT and BiFET productions have grown into multi-billion dollar businesses worldwide.

Throughout his career, Chang's research has been mostly in the development of high-speed semiconductor devices and integrated circuits for RF & mixed-signal communication and sensing system applications. He was the principal investigator at Rockwell to lead the US DARPA ADC and DAC development for direct conversion transceiver (DCT) and digital radar receivers (DRR) systems.

Chang was the inventor of the multi-band, re-configurable RF-Interconnects based on FDMA and CDMA multiple access algorithms for intra- and inter-ULSI communications. He pioneered the development of world's first multi-gigabit/sec ADC, DAC and DDS in both GaAs HBT and Si CMOS technologies and the first 60GHz radio transceiver based on transformer-folded-cascode (Origami) circuit architecture and low phase noise VCO with embedded digitally controlled artificial dielectric (DiCAD). He was also the first to demonstrate CMOS RFICs in the Tera-Hertz frequency range of 324GHz.

Chang has authored or co-authored over 250 technical papers, ten book chapters, and one book. He has also edited a book and holds 20 U.S. patents. He was an editor for the IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices (1999-2001) and served as a guest editor for the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits in 1991 and 1992 and for the Journal of High-Speed Electronics and Systems in 1994.

Elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2008, for the development and commercialization of GaAs power amplifiers and integrated circuits, Chang also received the IEEE David Sarnoff Award in 2006 and became a Fellow of IEEE in 1996. He also received Rockwell's Leonardo Da Vinci Award (Engineer of the Year) in 1992, National Chiao-Tung University's Distinguished Alumnus Award in 1997 and National Tsing-Hua University's Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2002.