Dr. Walid Y. Ali-Ahmad is a senior consultant for Mediatek Corporation RF division. He has been with Mediatek Singapore since September 2007, leading the RF systems development of 2.5G/3G/3.5G cellular RFICs.
Between September 2004 and September 2007, he was an associate professor in Electrical Engineering at the American University of Beirut, where his research interests focused on millimeter-wave wireless personal area networks. He was also involved with UCSD and Intel Corp. on a research project for the development of a 24GHz phased-array integrated radio transceiver. Between June 1997 and September 2004, he was a Principal Member of Technical Staff at Maxim Integrated Products, Sunnyvale, CA, in the wireless communications division. He was the first to architect and system design direct-conversion radios for broadband CDMA Wireless Local Loop systems and WCDMA cellular handsets. His work led to the development of the first low cost, small size, and ultra-low current consumption direct-conversion RFIC transceiver for 3G handsets. He worked at Cadence Design Systems between 1996 and 1997 where he was a key contributor to the development of RF IC system design methodology used their CAD tools. He also worked at Anritsu Company between 1994 and 1996, where his work on microwave components design led to the development of high-dynamic range wideband receivers for mixed-signal ATE.
Dr. Ali-Ahmad received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in May 1990 and December 1993, respectively. He was the recipient of the best paper award at the Agilent 2001 RF semiconductor Executive conference. He also received an MTT conference paper award for his PhD work in the area of millimeter-wave receivers design. He is a Senior IEEE member and a member of the RFIC technical program committee since 2004. He has more than 35 publications in conferences, journals, and technical magazines and has given several talks at different IEEE workshops in the area of RF transceiver design and millimeter-wave systems development.