Postgraduate Courses

This course is about fundamentals in optics and photonics. The “Optics” part includes ray optics, electromagnetic optics, plasmonics, coherence and polarization of light, etc. The “Photonics” part includes the science behind light generation (e.g. laser), manipulation (e.g. based on nonlinear optics) and photodetection (e.g. PN junction diodes).

This course is designed to provide an in-depth understanding of the fundamental properties and physics of semiconductors, along with the principles and applications of optoelectronic devices. It encompasses a comprehensive exploration of general semiconductor characteristics, including crystal structures, the process of crystal growth, and the pivotal concepts of energy bands. It delves into the significance of dopants and defects, the mechanisms of generation and recombination processes, and the dynamics of carrier transport, with a special focus on the device structures. An emphasis will be placed on laser technologies and cutting-edge MicroLED technologies and the modulation techniques. Furthermore, the course will provide a holistic view of the fabrication processes involved in creating optoelectronic devices.

This course explores the core principles of micro/nano processing technologies crucial for developing sophisticated optoelectronic devices. This course delves into the thermodynamics, kinetics of material growth, deposition methods, vacuum technology, cutting-edge deposition and characterization techniques, and advanced lithography. Students will learn to manipulate control parameters of these processes and understand their impact on optoelectronic device performance and applications. These devices are widely used in fields such as communications, transportation, environmental monitoring, aerospace applications, energy production, medical applications, and others.

This is a foundational course designed to introduce students to the operational principles and technology of semiconductor devices commonly used in modern VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration). The course will delve into a wide range of topics, including semiconductor statistics, IC manufacturing technology, PN junctions, Bipolar Junction Transistors (BJT), and MOSFETs. Additionally, this course will explore the future technology trends in the electronics industry, highlighting how modern VLSI technologies are sensitive to structural details and fabrication techniques. Students will gain insights into how VLSI devices are designed, the potential future evolutions in this field, and the impact of fabrication techniques on device electrical performance.

Building on the semiconductor fundamentals and device physics knowledge, this course teaches the latest development and advancement in CMOS devices and emerging device architectures, including novel memory technologies. Major topics covered in this course include (i) CMOS transistor scaling physics and short channel effects for nanoscale MOSFETs, (ii) advanced process technologies including high-k gate dielectrics, metal gates, ultra-shallow junctions, advanced doping techniques, and high mobility channels, (iii) device reliability, high-field behavior, and hot carrier effects, (iv) alternative nanoscale transistor architectures, (v) charge-based memory and non-volatile memory technology, and (vi) more-than-Moore technological trends.

This course introduces the operating principles and characterization of microelectronic devices, organized around two themes: device fundamentals and device measurement. It covers carrier statistics, PN and metal–semiconductor junctions, MOS structures, and MOSFET operation to build a strong understanding of device behavior and simple models. The course then focuses on widely used characterization approaches for extracting key material and device parameters such as resistivity, doping profiles, barrier height, MOS interface properties, and MOSFET channel parameters. Students will develop the ability to interpret measurement data and connect extracted parameters to device performance in modern microelectronics.

This course guides the students through the fundamentals of analog integrated circuits design in CMOS technologies. Knowledge in analog design is essential for further research and study in the IC design tracks. This course will cover the operation of MOSFETs, basic concepts of analog circuits design, the implementation of basic analog circuits from MOSFETs, and the realization of more complex CMOS circuits using basic analog building blocks.

This course introduces the design and analysis of clock generation integrated circuits. The covered topics include basic concepts, basic oscillator, oscillator analysis, advanced oscillator techniques, basic phase-locked loop architecture, integer-N PLLs, fractional-N PLLs, frequency dividers and multipliers, digital PLLs, advanced frequency synthesis and clock data recovery.

This is a foundation course in radio frequency integrated circuit design. The covered topics include basic concepts in RF design and wireless communication, transmission lines, passive devices, transceiver architectures, low noise amplifiers, mixers, baseband, phase-locked loops, power amplifier and transceiver SoC design.

This course will lead students through the entire process of designing, fabricating, and measuring photonic integrated circuits, allowing them to gain hands-on experience in simulating, designing, and measuring photonic chips. By the end of the course, students will be required to finalize their own photonic integrated circuit design and acquire experimental results. The course content includes an introduction to integrated photonics, photonic integrated components, photonic integrated circuits, simulation and design techniques, layout and fabrication procedures, design review and rule check, device measurement, data analysis, as well as recent advancements and applications of photonic integrated circuits.

This course will focus on the circuits and architectures for high-speed wireline data communications. The topics that will be covered in this course include wireline data link systems, transmitters, receivers, equalizers, clock and data recovery, etc. Upon finishing this course, students are expected to understand the basic principles of modern high-speed data link systems and grasp the essentials to design the integrated circuits for such systems.

This course offers an in-depth exploration of the contemporary VLSI circuit design. The material covers the design principles of digital circuits, as well as the designs of core VLSI building units, including combinational logic, sequential elements, arithmetic circuits, memory sub-systems, and other important circuits for VLSI system integration. Implementations in CMOS will be considered in relation to key design metrics such as timing, power, area, and reliability. This course is a project-oriented class, which requires students to design and layout VLSI circuits and sub-systems using commercially available design tools.

This course covers semiconductor memory technologies and circuit design from the device bit-cell structures to the memory array design with an emphasis on the industry trends and cutting-edge technologies. The topics include discussions of mainstream volatile and nonvolatile memory device technologies (e.g., SRAM, DRAM, FLASH) and their limitations. To go beyond these mature technologies, the course also explores emerging memory device technologies, followed by an introduction of their new applications, including processing-in-memory, compute-in-memory, neuromorphic hardware, etc.

The course will discuss the application of automated reasoning techniques in the verification of software and hardware components in electronic systems. This course will cover basic knowledge of logic, satisfiability solvers, model checking and their applications. This course also includes topics on circuit testing, for example, automatic test pattern generation and design for testing.

This course introduces the foundations of modern VLSI electronic design automation (EDA), with a focus on optimization and algorithm foundations for VLSI physical design problems. We will introduce partitioning, floor planning, placement, routing, manufacturability optimization, and mask optimization. We will see a set of concrete applications of various conventional optimization techniques in VLSI design, e.g., graph theory, convex programming, numerical optimization, etc.

This course aims to build a strong foundation and prepare students with modern computer architecture insights and techniques for future computer design. The course covers the fundamental and advanced concepts and principles in computer architecture, including processor, memory hierarchy, multicore, interconnection, and domain specialization.

This course aims to introduce photonics technology from devices to systems for high-capacity optical interconnects within the integrated circuit package. The course covers topics such as an introduction to optical interconnects, optical waveguides and fibers, attenuation and dispersion, fundamentals of key optoelectronic devices, high-speed optical transmitters and receivers, optical communication systems, advanced modulation formats and detection schemes, multiplexing techniques, as well as the latest trends and developments in optical interconnect technology.

This course is designed to introduce hardware for machine learning to students. It will focus on the basics of deep learning, computations and dataflow of inference and training, hardware accelerator implementations and co-optimization of software and hardware techniques. This course is particularly targeted to help students comprehensively understand the design principles and techniques of hardware accelerators for machine learning systems using state-of-the-art structures (e.g., FPGAs, ASICs, CIM).

Parallel processing is ubiquitous in modern computer systems, ranging from smartphones to multicore processors to data center computers. This course aims to introduce the fundamental issues and principles in designing modern parallel computers. The course covers parallel programming models and parallel architecture designs, including shared memory, message passing, cache coherence, memory consistency, interconnection networks, parallel and distributed systems.

This course introduces the principles and techniques of GPU-accelerated computing for high-performance applications in AI, data analytics, and scientific simulation. Students will learn modern GPU architectures, the CUDA and ROCm programming models, memory hierarchy, thread organization, and performance optimization strategies. Through hands-on programming and a term-long project, students will gain practical experience in leveraging massive parallelism to solve real-world computational challenges.

This course introduces the principles, architectures, and design methodologies of FPGA-based custom computing. Students will learn modern FPGA platforms, HLS programming, memory and dataflow optimization, and accelerator design for computation-intensive workloads such as deep learning, large language models, graph processing, and database systems. Hands-on examples and a term-long project guide students to build efficient hardware accelerators using C/C++ HLS tools.

This course introduces the basic concepts of embedded system design. It covers the modeling and specification, hardware/software co-design, architectures, real-time operating systems, compression, compilation, and design space exploration. It will also cover other topics, such as security, verification, and validation. The goal of this course is to help students develop a comprehensive understanding of the technologies behind the embedded systems design.

The course covers special topics for graduate studies in different areas. The topics will be updated frequently to reflect latest interests and research development. May be graded by letter, P/F or PP for different offerings.

An independent study on selected topics carried out under the supervision of a faculty member.

Master's thesis research supervised by co-advisors from different disciplines. A successful defense of the thesis leads to the grade Pass. No course credit is assigned.

Original and independent doctoral thesis research supervised by co-advisors from different disciplines. A successful defense of the thesis leads to the grade Pass. No course credit is assigned.