BJB's Background Summary:

Benjamin J. Blalock was born in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1968. He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 1991 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees, also in electrical engineering, from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, in 1993 and 1996, respectively.

While at Georgia Tech, his research activities included noise characterization of GaAs MESFETs, BiCMOS operational amplifier design, CMOS current-feedback amplifier design, and ultralow-voltage CMOS analog circuit design for signal processing and power management applications. Dr. P. E. Allen was his Ph.D. advisor. He twice served as the analog/mixed-signal lecturer in Georgia Tech's VLSI Design and Test short course.

Benjamin joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Mississippi State University in November 1996. His teaching responsibilities there included digital VLSI and analog IC design. As part of his research effort at MSU, Benjamin led the mixed-signal group effort within the Information Sensing Systems Laboratory. His research focus included partially-depleted and fully-depleted SOI CMOS mixed-signal library development (references, comparators, opamps, and ADCs), an active substrate driver for mixed-voltage systems-on-a-chip in SOI technology, CMOS low-voltage analog IC design, single-poly EEPROM structures and applications, MOSFET flicker-noise mechanisms, and Silicon-Carbide analog IC design.

August 2001, Benjamin joined the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee. His teaching emphasis at UT is analog/mixed-signal microelectronics. Benjamin's research focus at UT is analog IC design for extreme environments (wide temperature and radiation) on CMOS and SiGe BiCMOS, mixed-signal/mixed-voltage circuit design for systems-on-a-chip in SOI technology, multi-gate transistors and circuits on SOI, and body-driven circuit techniques for ultra low-voltage CMOS analog. He is currently an Associate Professor at UT and directs the Integrated Circuits and Systems Laboratory (ICASL). Benjamin has co-authored 100 refereed papers in the field of analog/mixed-signal IC design and semiconductor devices. He has also contributed to The Circuits and Filters Handbook. Benjamin was a short course lecturer for the 2007 IEEE Nuclear Science and Radiation Effects Conference (NSREC) program, his talk focusing on Radiation Effects on Analog Integrated Circuits and Extreme Environment Design.

Benjamin has also worked as an analog IC design consultant for Cypress Semiconductor Corp. and Concorde Microsystems Inc.