2008

Mohamed Sayed was born in Cairo, Egypt where he obtained his BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering from Cairo University. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

Mohamed worked at Hewlett-Packard Company for 27 years, and three years for Agilent Technologies. He developed and launched state-of-the-art microwave and millimeter wave systems and products through initiating and creating cutting-edge technologies for vector network analyzers, sources, spectrum analyzers, and counters. He has been principal consultant for Microwave and Millimeter Wave Solutions since April 2003.

Mohamed taught graduate and undergraduate courses at Cairo University, Johns Hopkins University, Howard University, and San Jose State University. In addition, he has been a technical advisor for Masters, Doctoral and Post Doctoral candidates.

Mohamed is author and co-author of over 50 publications in the field of device characterization, microwave and millimeter wave measurement systems and high power amplifier design. He is currently the Chair for the MTT Santa Clara Valley (SCV) Chapter in California.  He was invited to give several presentations on millimeter wave instrumentation and high power characterization at Stanford University, Long Beach, Morgan Hill, Santa Rosa, Santa Clara, San Jose and Phoenix. Since 2004 Mohamed has been very active in ARFTG and has served on its Executive Committee as Nomination Chair and is currently the Technical Coordinator Chair. He was the General Chair for the 70th ARFTG Symposium held in Tempe, Arizona November 2007. He was also the Technical Program Chair (TPC) for the 46th, 66th, 67th, and 68th ARFTG conferences.

Luiz M. Franca-Neto earned the Electronics Engineering degree from ITA, SJC - Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1989, M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1995 and 1999 respectively.  He was a design engineer with Elebra/Alcatel Telecomunicaes in Sao Paulo from 1990 to 1992. He was a researcher with Intel Labs and later a technical leader & manager with Intel Communications Group from 1999 to 2006, where he developed new approaches to substrate noise control to enable integration of delicate RF circuits and noisy digital processor on the same die by exploiting structure of the spectrum of substrate noise. He developed new circuit methods for low noise amplifiers and circuit operation close to transistors fmax. He demonstrated record setting low noise amplifiers at 17 GHz and 24 GHz, both ISM bands in USA, and the first 100 GHz circuits on CMOS and led the efforts towards silicon-package co-design for RF front ends. Since 2007, He has been with Hitachi. He has more than 15 invited and peer-reviewed publications, 18 issued patents and some mere pending with US PTO. His interests are in high speed circuits for wireless and wireline applications and novel storage circuit and architecture solutions.

Jay Banwait received his BS from Kings College University of London, England. He came over to California in 1982 and has spent the last 26 years in the Bay Area in various RF and Microwave company’s, start-ups as well as large established companies. Jay received his Masters from Santa Clara University in 1993. Jay has been active in the IEEE for several years, notably as the Focused and Special Sessions Chair for 2006 IMS and Co-chair for Focused and Special Sessions 2007 IMS. He was elected secretary of the MTT-SCV chapter in 2007 and is this years MTT-SCV Chapter treasurer. Jay is a Senior IEEE member and is currently working as the RF Department Manager at Northrop Grumman (ESL labs) in San Jose.

Nima Lahijani Shams was born in Tehran, Iran and moved to Germany and eventually the States at a very young age.  Nima attained his B.S. with Honors in Electrical Engineering from the University of California Davis, were he focused on EM/RF design.  While a student at the University of California Davis, he served as lab assistant to Professor Rick Branner.  For his hard work and research on high-frequency device modeling he was published under Professor Branner's Ph.D. student Jessi Johnson.  Graduating from UC Davis, Nima joined Tyco Electronics as a Design Engineer within the RF/EM group directly responsible for the design of broadband RF/EM prototype sub-systems.  In addition to working full time at Tyco, Nima continued his education at Santa Clara University where he focused in RF/RFIC/EM design, attained his Masters in two and half years.  Currently he serves as Staff Design Engineer at Tyco Electronics where he is directly in charge of the design and development of multimillion-dollar EM/RF hybrid modules.  Nima served on the steering committee of IEEE IMS 2006 in San Francisco and was elected as Secretary of IEEE MTT-SCV in 2008.  Nima is also an active member of the Tau Beta Pi Honors Society.

MTT SCV seminars and short courses are organized through the volunteer efforts of its elected officers.  From Secretary to Chair, each member volunteers four (or more) years of service.

Below are this year’s officers and their biographies.

MTT SCV Officers

Michael Forman received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering with an emphasis in microwave technology from the University of Colorado at Boulder under the direction of Professor Zoya Popović in 2001.  After graduation Michael joined Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico pursuing research in radar, RF microsystems, and ad-hoc networking.  He has since transfered to Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California as a Principal Member of the Technical Staff (PMTS).  Current research interests include thick-metal RF microsystems, high-impedance surfaces, and intrinsically secure communications.  Michael was a member of the Steering Committee for the 2006 International Microwave Symposium (IMS) in San Francisco and the 2007 IMS in Honolulu, creating the event’s first new Program Book in 10 years.  Wanting to continue his service to the MTT-S in the area of publishing, Michael has volunteered to update and maintain the MTT-SCV website.