James K. Roberge, was a professor of electrical engineering and a member of the MIT faculty since 1967.
Born in Jersey City, N.J., in 1938, Roberge went to MIT in 1956, earning his SB, SM, and ScD degrees, all in electrical engineering. For nearly all of his professional career, Roberge worked for MIT — from postdoc to full professor, a position he attained in 1976. Starting in 1969, Roberge also performed research as a visiting scientist at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory.
At Lincoln Lab, Roberge’s research interests in the areas of electronic circuits and systems design led him to work in a division involved in space communications, instrumentation, and optical communications. His designs have flown on nine satellites.
Vincent Chan headed the division at Lincoln Lab in which Roberge worked. Chan says that Roberge’s most important contributions were in ultrahigh-efficiency power converters for spacecraft and high-precision optical tracking electronics for space-laser communications.
“[Roberge] brought together his knowledge of circuit designs, control system theory, and a large dose of ingenuity to design these systems,” Chan notes. Despite the fact that some of Roberge’s work was done in the 1980s and 1990s, Chan says, “it still represents the state of the art.”
Thomas H. Lee received the S.B., S.M. and Sc.D. degrees in electrical engineering, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1983, 1985, and 1990, respectively. He joined Analog Devices in 1990 where he was primarily engaged in the design of high-speed clock recovery devices. In 1992, he joined Rambus Inc. in Mountain View, CA where he developed high-speed analog circuitry for 500 megabyte/s CMOS DRAMs. He has also contributed to the development of PLLs in the StrongARM, Alpha and AMD K6/K7/K8 microprocessors. Since 1994, he has been a Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University where his research focus has been on gigahertz-speed wireline and wireless integrated circuits built in conventional silicon technologies, particularly CMOS.
He has twice received the “Best Paper” award at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, co-authored a “Best Student Paper” at ISSCC, was awarded the Best Paper prize at CICC, and is a Packard Foundation Fellowship recipient. He served for a decade as an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer of the Solid-State Circuits Society, and has been a DL of the IEEE Microwave Society as well. He holds 57 U.S. patents and authored The Design of CMOS Radio-Frequency Integrated Circuits (now in its second edition), and Planar Microwave Engineering, both with Cambridge University Press. He is a co-author of four additional books on RF circuit design, and also cofounded Matrix Semiconductor (acquired by Sandisk in 2006). He is the founder of ZeroG Wireless. He is currently on leave from Stanford to serve as MTO Director at DARPA.
