Willy Sansen has received the MSc degree in Electrical Engineering from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in 1967 and the PhD degree in Electronics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1972.
In 1972 he was appointed by the National Fund of Scientific Research (Belgium) at the ESAT laboratory of the K.U.Leuven, where he has been a full professor since 1980. During the period 1984-1990 he was the head of the Electrical Engineering Department. From 1984 to 2008 he was head of the ESAT-MICAS laboratory on analog design, which counts about sixty members and which is mainly active in research projects with industry and in teaching worldwide.
In 1978 he was a visiting professor at Stanford University, in 1981 at the EPFL Lausanne, in 1985 at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, in 1994 at the T.H. Ulm and in 2004 at Infineon, Villach. Prof. Sansen is a member of several editorial and program committees of journals and conferences. He is cofounder and organizer of the workshops on Advances in Analog Circuit Design in Europe. He is a member of the executive and program committees of the IEEE ISSCC conference. He was program chair of the ISSCC-2002 conference and was President of the Solid-State Circuits Society in 2008/2009. He is a life-fellow of the IEEE.
He has been involved in design automation and in numerous analogue integrated circuit designs for telecommunications, consumer electronics, medical applications and sensors. He has been supervisor of over sixty-five PhD theses in these fields. He has authored and coauthored more than 620 papers in international journals and conference proceedings and fifteen books, among which “Analog design essentials” (Springer 2008).
