Professor Dennis Sylvester, Universtiy of Michigan, Named IEEE Fellow

Prof. Dennis Sylvester has been named an IEEE Fellow, Class of 2011, “for contributions to energy-efficient integrated circuits.”

Prof. Sylvester has pioneered the development of ultra low-power CMOS circuits, paving the way for their use in a growing number of applications. A key to much of his recent work has been the use of extremely low operating voltages (approximately one-third to one-half that of typical ICs today).  

As micropower circuits thrust leader for the Center for Wireless Integrated Microsystems (WIMS), he directed several advances in low-power low-voltage solid-state circuits that are of seminal importance to microelectronics, and he is continuing to facilitate the use of these low-power circuits in many areas, including distributed environmental sensing and implantable biomedical microsystems. His group has developed novel approaches to watchdog timers, nanowatt temperature sensors, and low-voltage robust memories.  In all cases, the power consumption of these circuit building blocks have been one or more orders of magnitude below the existing state of the art. 

His work with colleague Prof. David Blaauw on the chip known as the Phoenix Chip evolved into the Phoenix-2 microsystem, a 9-cubic millimeter solar-powered sensor system that is the smallest system of its type to ever be reported.