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Professor Joy Laskar is helping make Georgia Tech a center for the design of integrated circuits the chips that make computers, cell phones and many other electronic devices possible.
As director of the Georgia Electronic Design Center (GEDC) at Georgia Tech, Laskar heads 250 faculty and student researchers involved in developing mixed-signal circuits, which are designs that combine both analog and digital components to achieve maximum performance. He has been a driving force in GEDC’s emergence as one of Georgia Tech’s largest extramurally funded centers, as well as one of its most productive sources of commercialization, publications and patents.
The fastest-growing and most profitable segment of the microelectronics industry is the mixed-signal segment, which includes analog, wireless and high-speed signal processing, Laskar said. The GEDC team is committed to making Georgia Tech the premier academic center for mixed-signal electronic research and design.
GEDC’s multi-disciplinary approach supports application development in a range of focus areas, including:
multi-gigabit wireless video transmission;
wireless radio-frequency identification sensors for ad-hoc networks;
agile optical/photonic fiber-optic networks;
cognitive-radio communication technology for adaptive radar and consumer electronics.
GEDC’s work aids Georgia’s economic development at the national and international levels. Laskar travels the world building research relationships with top technology companies and federal agencies. Within the last two years, his efforts have helped Georgia Tech establish important research relationships with Samsung, Pirelli, Siemens and the U.S. Department of Defense partnerships that have included establishment of corporate laboratories on campus.
Laskar, who holds the Schlumberger Chair in Microelectronics in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is a distinguished researcher, working in several areas including cognitive systems, gigabit wireless and silicon radar. He has personal experience with successful company startups, including RF-Solutions, a chip-design company now part of Anadigics Inc.; and Quellan Inc., which develops signal-processing products for several markets.
He has also authored or co-authored more than 400 papers and book chapters and has more than 25 patents pending. He has received numerous honors including the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award, the Georgia Tech Faculty Mentor of the Year and the IEEE Fellow designation. | 