Congratulations Dr Abdulaziz Alhoshany

Dr Abdulaziz Alhoshany defended his thesis which was highly received.  Abdulaziz worked on optimizing the energy efficiency of wireless sensor nodes and miniature biomedical devices. For a sensor node which is the sensor and readout circuit to survive on limited energy sources such as a battery or harvested energy, the energy consumption of the sensor node should be minimized. Capacitive sensors are candidates for use in energy-constrained applications, as they do not consume static power and can be used in wide range of applications to measure different physical, chemical or biological quantities. However, the energy consumption is dominant by the capacitive interface circuit, i.e., capacitance to digital converter (CDC). Several energy-efficient CDC architectures are introduced in this dissertation to meet the demand for high resolution and energy efficient in smart capacitive sensors. Prof. Pamela Abshire, Fellow IEEE and professor at the university of Maryland, served as the external examiner and commented that " This work presents a major contribution to the field of capacitance-to-digital converters, particularly for low power and high energy efficiency. The comparison between different CDC approaches and the related text is very nice."  Energy consumed per measurement vs ENOB for state-of-the art CDCs More details can be found in his thesis titled "Energy-Efficient Capacitance-to-Digital Converters for Smart Sensor Applications". Altogether Abdulaziz published five papers in well-read and respected journals. The work resulted in the following papers: Abdulaziz Alhoshany, and Khaled Nabil Salama " A Precision, Energy-Efficient, Noise-Shaping Differential SAR Capacitance-to-Digital Converter with Ring-Oscillator-Based Comparator," IEEE Sensors Journal, under review Abdulaziz Alhoshany, Shilpa Sivashankar, Yousof Mashraei, Hesham Omran and Khaled Nabil Salama "A Biosensor-CMOS Platform and Integrated Readout  Circuit in 0.18-μm CMOS Technology for Cancer Biomarker Detection," Sensors 2017, 17, 1942. H. Omran, Abdulaziz Alhoshany, H. Alahmadi, and K. N. Salama, A 33fJ/Step SAR Capacitance-to-Digital Converter Using a Chain of Inverter-Based Amplifiers" IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I, vol 64, no 2,pp 310-321, 2017 10.1109/TCSI.2016.2608905 Abdulaziz Alhoshany, Hesham Omran, Khaled N. Salama, "A 45.8fJ/Step, Energy-Efficient, Differential SAR Capacitance-to-Digital Converter for Capacitive Pressure Sensing", Sensors & Actuators: A. Physical, Vol 245, Pages 10–18, 2016 H. Omran, A. Alhoshany, H. Alahmadi , and K. N. Salama, “A 35fJ/Step Differential Successive Approximation Capacitive Sensor Readout Circuit with Quasi-Dynamic Operation,” Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits, 2016.