Tamal Mukherjee

Associate Department Head for Students
and Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Bio

Tamal Mukherjee is interested in design techniques and methodologies at the boundary of analog, RF, microelectromechanical systems and microfluidic systems. Applications include inertial MEMS to support  GPS-challenged navigation, RF communication and localization to augment inertial MEMS. His recent interest has been in on high dynamic  range sensing through sensor fusion using multiple sensors (either on a single chip or across multiple chips in a sensor system). Typically this involves using multiple types of physics to extend the dynamic range of a single sensor.

Education

Ph.D., 1995 
Electrical and Computer Engineering 
Carnegie Mellon University

M.S., 1990 
Electrical and Computer Engineering 
Carnegie Mellon University

B.S., 1987 
Electrical and Computer Engineering 
Carnegie Mellon University

Research

Design Automation for Micro-electromechanical Systems (MEMS)

MEMS enable the integration of sensors and actuators onto the same chip, processing the information in a digital manner to generate complete systems on a chip. The availability of turnkey fabrication facilities for MEMS has led to a growing MEMS design bottleneck due to the lack of computer-aided design tools. Dr. Mukherjee's research group is developing a complete design methodology for integrated MEMS that includes lumped-parameter reusable models to speed up the design iteration, numerical algorithms for generating MEMS designs from engineering specifications and geometric algorithms for MEMS extraction.

Design Automation for Microfluidics-based BioChips

Dr. Mukherjee's group is also developing a complete design methodology for microchannel-based Lab-on-A-Chip systems.

MEMS-enhanced Reconfigurable RF Circuits

Micromachining in RF foundry processes enhances inductor and capacitor quality factors, increases varactor tuning range and integrates electromechanical mixer filters that downconvert from GHz to MHz with built-in frequency selectivity. Dr. Mukherjee's group is developing an on-chip parallel receiver architecture and circuit blocks incorporating these devices for spectrum sensing and RF communication with ultra low power operation.

Keywords

• Analog/RF/MEMS/biofluidic microsystem design
• Circuit design